Ouch. And now for my OT 2cents. Last week I launched 5 simultaneous Vegas renders overnight. In the morning, the Raid 0 drive was toast. As a cheap amateur, I have no way to fully backup the 320GB Raid 0, so I'd backed up the critical 30GB to another harddrive and archived all my raw video to CD. Luckily, the Raid crash was not hardware related (the drives were ok after a delete/recreate of the driver and a full reformat), so I was able to reinstall, restore the 30GB and then spend a good portion of the weekend patiently recovering from 300CDs. This week is spent re-rendering. Oh joy.

One moral of the story is that Raid 0 can crash if you push it too hard. I don't really understand it, but its not failed hardware and its not corrupted files. "Something" got corrupted and the drive went "offline". The BIOS told me that one drive was ok and the other could not be found. The only solution was to delete the Raid then create a new one, losing everything in the process.

So Jay, you have 450 hours and 13GB/hr = 5850GB. Say you archive to DVDs, so 5850/4.5 = 1300, say 1500 DVDs. At 50c/DVD, that's about $750 in DVD costs. Should be able to get a volume discount :-) What speed is your DVD burner? They say an 8x burner can burn a DVD in 8 minutes. Make it 10. Double it so you can verify the files, so 20 min/DVD. 1500*20/60= 500hrs. Ah hell, these are guesstimates so say 750 hrs optimistically and 1000 hrs realistically :-)

Now if you go the QuickPar route for redundancy, you're going to spend many times this amount of time while QuickPar does its math. And if you use backup software like Retrospect or Veritas (which will do the verification and prompting for you, automatically), its not going to write to the DVD at the full 8x, so maybe that 1000hrs is a good guess. 25 weeks of 40hr/week. Heck, 15 months is plenty of time! :->

But the good news is that your computer can do all this in the background. I spend a lot of time working on video or doing something else in the computer with a pile of CD/DVDs to one side, just ejecting and reinserting them every few minutes when the computer beeps at me. And the backup software does things incrementally, so you can snapshot whatever you've got at the moment, then do another backup later and only the changes are written.