A big safe deposit box and a few 300 GB external drives may be sufficient, and only a few hundred dollars a year.

Problem is that relies on ME!

This is clients data, around 1TB of it and growing. Currently on audio tapes stored in archival 'bunkers'. The ability to read the tapes is fast fading, both the tapes and the hardware to read them. I'm working through the process of digitising it (slowly).

It seems to me that having it stored on 3rd party systems that are mirrored to several physical locations on the planet offers ease of access, disaster proofing etc.

Of course if it relies on a commercial venture then there's a problem I guess, they could easily go bust. Might be a good role for some non commercial body to underwrite and guarantee, preferably multinational.

Bob.

Problem is that relies on ME!

What solution doesn't rely on you? You've got to deliver the data in some form, on some media (or over the net) to someone. Again, not to be repetitive, but four 250 GB drives ($100 each, or less on sale), and a bank with a vault, and you've got your solution. You don't even have to invest in an external enclosure for each drive. Just put the drive in an enclosure, fill it up, and then remove it and put it into a static-free envelope, and store. Thus, you don't have to spend $$$ for external enclosures.

"A big safe deposit box and a few 300 GB external drives may be sufficient, and only a few hundred dollars a year."

That's how I'm doing it.

Agreed,
for MY stuff this is fine. Do this sort of thing all the time, even kept a copy on data tapes at another physical location.

However my client needs access to the data (it is their data after all) and they don't have physical storage facilities, well they do and it's bursting at the seams, literally, and they're loosing stuff so they want to pay me for a solution.

This data needs to be accessible for at least the next 100 years, much of it is already over 50 years old. The main part of their data storage is currently being digitised to DLT tapes at a cost of around $5M / year however this sounds to me like a very dumb solution, at best it's nearline access, at worst a retrieval nightmare as DLT fades into oblivion.

Some body similar to orchive.org would seem a much better way to store data that has no expiry date, one body handles the problem of physical format redundancy. I'm thinking a financial arrangement similar to how cemeteries are run.

Bob.

Bob,

I've been struggling with this dilema for a long time. I've been recording stuff since the mid-60s and I have audio and video on pretty much every format that has ever existed. What do I do with it? Transfer it to a different format every ten years onto whatever new flavor of media is popular at the moment? As I generate more and more stuff, it gets less and less practical to keep up with the archiving. As it stands now, I maintain a collection of working playback units for all of the formts which I have. This isn't particularly practical (or cost effective) either, but I'm doing it. I'm not sure what the answer is, but in the meantime, I've been transferring all the "important" material to digital media. If I were to do all of it, I'd be looking at literally hundreds of terabytes.

Digital media presents its own set of issues, not the least of which is that no digital media is TRULY safe unless AT LEAST two copies exist, preferably in two different locations.

Where is that sugar-cube-sized 1,000 TB holographic storage media they've been talking about?

John

Bob,

Your problem is a good deal tougher than I realized. 100 years. Wow.

And I sympathize with John on the number of different pieces of hardware you've got to keep running in order to play anything. I have 78 rpm, 33 rpm turntables with different styli; reel-to-reel decks; dictation equipment; VHS, SVHS, Laserdisc, 8mm, Hi8, DV, and HDV video; and several other things, not to mention all the equipment that play small round shiny objects.

John:
I had a good friend and professor who, back in the mid-70's was awarded a patent for a gizmo he developed that would record sound onto holographic media - and it had no moving parts.

He was invited to some of the major companies around the country - received many accolades, but no venture capital money. Everyone was busy developing the CD. I'm guessing he's lost or near losing the exclusive rights to that patent, and, the time may be near when his idea now makes sense to the powers that be.

Guess that's the way it works with some folks.

Del

If you could settle for five petabytes capacity (a bit over 5 million gigabytes) for your video archive, Quantum has a new tape backup product for you.

Or if you could settle for even less, they have a 25 terabyte 2U rackmounted autoloader for $7,000, which is a lot less than ye olde SDLT600-based loaders.

If you need to really scrape the barrel, you can get just a bare 800GB tape drive for $4,495.

Quantum's roadmap shows a migration path to 14 TB on a single cartridge, so there is hope for video storage.

Note that this is enterprise-level data archival quality, not the #$#@&*&@ video tape archival quality we have had to put up with for way too long.

More info here.