Anybody out there using a Blu-Ray disk for backup?
I have so many terabytes of data that burning DVDs is simply not practical any more. I need larger capacity.
I'd like to get a Blu-Ray burner that will fit inside and work with my Mac Pro if at all possible.
Cost is not an object. It just has to work. I already have multiple hard drive/RAID backup solutions and need a semi-long-term optical storage option so I can take those off site. I know optical disks can degrade over time too which is why I have both hard drive and optical disk backups.
I appreciate anyone's insight and advice into an optical disk storage solution.
Have you considered backing up to magnetic tape? They store FAR more then even blu-ray disks do -- and are made for archiving. With multiple terabytes it MAY be cost effective for medium-long term storage. You would, however, give up random access capabilities.
Things will change, but I'm convinced that a multitude of hard drives are still the best solution when dealing with more than one or two TB's of image files.
Just keep them separate to keep them safe. You know the drill.
I won't be moving to Blu-Ray any time soon. I remember paying $350 for my first CD burner. While at the time, it was well worth the price, if I had waited 8-12 months, I could have purchased the a burner that was 4x faster for about one third the price. I also waited before getting my first DVD burner for the same reason. I don't feel I suffered unduly for waiting.
I keep two copies of EVERYTHING on separate drives, one set kept off-site as well as a DVD backup. Blu-Ray looks really tempting, but I'll wait a little longer.
Sm5rc wrote:
Have you considered backing up to magnetic tape? They store FAR more then even blu-ray disks do -- and are made for archiving. With multiple terabytes it MAY be cost effective for medium-long term storage. You would, however, give up random access capabilities.
Good advice when dealing with terabytes of data. Although a good tape drive can be pricey. You are looking at something in the neighborhood of $1500-2000 for a 400gb/800gb compressed drive. You can get one cheaper, but the capacity will be less. This price is for an new ultrium tape drive (although you can find cheaper drives on ebay) but these are very fast.
The media cost to back up 1 terabyte would be around $100-140 for tapes. The same blue ray media would cost around $400 in discs not to mention the time spent swapping out roughly 20 discs.
Tapes are very reliable and easy to store off-site.
I would stick with hard drives. From my experience burned DVDs are quite short-lived and I do not trust them at all now. CDs live longer, but you'll end up with an unmanageable mountain of them. I expect Blu-Ray to be even more unstable than DVD personally--I hope I'm wrong.
nathanlake wrote:
Interesting that large companies almost universally use tape for large data backups. There is a reason for that.
I work for a very large company and we use HD's.
For a small business or individual, tape's a big problem because tape standards change and none of them are common enough that you can be confident that 10 years from now you'll still be be able to find compatible devices. I used to use tapes of the TRAVAN standard until I discovered that it was an actual line item of the standard that TRAVAN drives were only required to be backward compatible 1 generation back.
The other problem is that tape drives are uncommon. Say you use USB HD's or DVD's for backup. If your studio burns down you just go to your nearest Circuit-City (or whatever) and buy a new PC, grab your backup USB HD or stack of DVD's, and you're back up in a few hours. Or just plug your backup into someone else's computer to receover even faster. But if you're backed up on tape you need to buy a new tape drive and that's not usually an off-the-shelf item at most stores.
The problem with multiple hard drives is that unless you spin them up every six months they are subject to failure at a much higher rate than normal.
I honestly had forgotten about tape backup completely. I'll have to give that a look see although plnelson makes some salient points about getting back up and running easily.
I remember having to deal with the big reel tapes many years ago.
plnelson wrote:
I work for a very large company and we use HD's.
I worked for one of the large backup and revcovery vendors, and I would be very surprised if you use HDs for your primary backup. Many companies use HDs for "near-line" storage, but every one that I have ever seen uses tape for true off-line storage. They have a SAN or NAS which is HD based, but eventually, that SAN or NAS is backed up to tape.
nathanlake wrote:
I worked for one of the large backup and revcovery vendors, and I would be very surprised if you use HDs for your primary backup. Many companies use HDs for "near-line" storage, but every one that I have ever seen uses tape for true off-line storage. They have a SAN or NAS which is HD based, but eventually, that SAN or NAS is backed up to tape.
I have no idea what they use in accounting or payroll or HR but I work in R&D where we need to back up software revisions, which probably have shorter lifespans, before they become totally obsolete.
But since you work in data recovery, maybe you can illuminate the tape question: What's the status of tape technology suitable for small business and sole proprietorships? Is there a tape standard suitable for a PC, that's widely-available from multiple vendors, and technologically stable and standardized enough so I'm likely to still be able to buy such a device 5 years from now? I got burned on TRAVAN 10 years ago because it kept changing so my older tapes were no longer compatible plus it was too hard to find vendors and media. What's the current "standard" and how "standard" is it?
I opted for a pair of HDs for my long term off site security. I have one on-line and let it do a back-up of any new/changed files every night. Every couple of weeks I pull it off and change it for the second one. That night the backup takes a while (normally less than an hour, depending on how much stuff I have added and how long its been since I switched them out), but I am normally asleep and don't care.
This gives me my working HD, plus an active backup HD that is always less than 1 day old, plus an off site backup HD that is never more than two weeks old. I probably should change weekly, but must of my work is charity-based and my income doesn't depend on it.
I will admit that I also burn a spare DVD when I do the disks for delivery to the people I am working with, but it normally only has the final shots, not the entire work package.
My experience with backup mag tape when I worked with DoD was far less than stellar, and we eventually had our ADP service contractor move to a mirror image HD RAID system and pulled a HD every week to go off site, with a tape burned only once a month (we obviously never intended to use the tape for anything, but our higher command required one for "catastrophic" recovery).
You can get pocket sized 350GB USB drives for peanuts these days --perfectly good for backup and fast -- 4 or 5 of these disks won't cost you more than 500 USD for the lot and they need no extra power so you can plug them into a laptop if you want to restore your backup to a laptop's hard disk.
You can also get fixed SATA hard drives 1TB for around 100 USD. Hard disks are CHEAP / DIRT CHEAP these days.
Forget magnetic tape too expensive and overkill for non-corporate type of operations and Blue Ray -- too slow for normal backup - note not archive - see later in this post.
Now Archiving is another matter --by all means archive off your hard disk backups to Blue Ray --quite a sensible idea in fact and store one copy off site.
Note when doing any backup ALWAYS backup to 2 sets of media and DO TEST A RESTORE FROM TIME TO TIME. The backup will often work without error but you might find all sorts of errors on a restore.
Use a decent commercial backup software package such as acronis (http://www.acronis.com) or similar. These only cost around 50 - 70 USD , handle incremental backups (i.e save the CHANGES since the last backup) and can automatically span media i.e prompts you to insert / connect new media when the current one is full.
Note also that RAID has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with backup or archiving.
Finally also to re-iterate again please understand the difference between ARCHIVE and BACKUP. If you are worried that your hard disks will fail over a long period then you have mis-understood the difference between backup and permanent archive.
You shouldn't use HD's for permanent archive -- as explained in the post use these for backups --maybe save several generations of backups but then copy the backups you've made to BLU Ray DVD's as your archives and reuse the disks again. You can schedule the archives to run whenever you like but say weekly probably would be fine.
Your Backups should really be run daily -- at least an incremental backup should be run daily and a new full backup run weekly.
There is no point in archiving an incremental backup to DVD (Blu ray or whatever) as the restore would require the DVD's from the last FULL backup plus all the intervening incremental backups. A Horrendous nightmare if you have a lot of data.
Restoring from a full backup however is fine -- you can even do a "Bare metal restore" if you create bootable media from the backup products from companies such as acronis (http://www.acronis.com) or similar.
Final remark here
Of course once you've created your backup you can run the archive any time so you can even run this during your normal "daily" work processing --run as a background job.
This would fit the bill http://tinyurl.com/4rwyco LTO4 Tape drive that is Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). <- 800gb tape native up to 1.6 terabytes compressed, but probably much lower compression with photos than 2-1. The SAS interface requires a card, $100.
As with ANY media the storage environment is key. Store the tapes in a cool dry place. Anything can and will fail and nobody can prove that one medium will outlast the other.
TJ Asher wrote:
The problem with multiple hard drives is that unless you spin them up every six months they are subject to failure at a much higher rate than normal.
I'm trying to figure this one out.
I've been working witn hard drives for over 20 years. In the last 7-8 years, I've built a business with lots of computers and lots more hard drives - on the order of 100+ hard drives.
Over the years, some get shelved for being too small when I upgrade RAID arrays. I'd say a couple dozen have been sitting dormant for 6 months to 2+ years. Recently, I've been putting those drives in newer boxes whose original hard drive has failed. ALL of them so far have worked fine.
In my experience, and statistically speaking for electronics - turning them off and on is the #1 killer - right up there with heat. Then there can be a bad series of drives that fail right away, and some others that just fail before MTBF.
I've never heard of having to spin up drives to keep them 'alive'. Can you please elaborate or back up this claim?
Burned media is probably the worst way you can go, but all these suggested methods will fail. Some sooner than others, but all will fail.. Of that you can be 100% sure....
The only safe long term back up is stone and chisel.... I suggest you select only your best images for storage though, because it's going to take a long time to carve all those 0's and 1's into your storage tablets. :d
plnelson wrote:
I have no idea what they use in accounting or payroll or HR but I work in R&D where we need to back up software revisions, which probably have shorter lifespans, before they become totally obsolete.
But since you work in data recovery, maybe you can illuminate the tape question: What's the status of tape technology suitable for small business and sole proprietorships? Is there a tape standard suitable for a PC, that's widely-available from multiple vendors, and technologically stable and standardized enough so I'm likely to still be able to buy such a device 5 years from now? I got burned on TRAVAN 10 years ago because it kept changing so my older tapes were no longer compatible plus it was too hard to find vendors and media. What's the current "standard" and how "standard" is it?
The 8mm, DAT and DLT are the most common tape standards and have been stable formats for several years. Most major backup hardware vendors make them. I like the Sony line, but Exabyte is considered the leader in this space.
Only the 8mm is really within the price range of an individual. The Exabyte Eliant 820 is less than $250 and is a pretty nice drive. It saves data on 8mm tapes that run about $12 (Exatape 160) and has an uncompressed capacity of 7Gb (14Gb compressed). Longer (higher capacity) tapes are available.
I just can't trust all my backups to only sources that can be erased by accident with a magnet and data recovery is too expensive when optical disks are so cheap.
Kyle Yates wrote:
You can get pocket sized 350GB USB drives for peanuts these days --perfectly good for backup and fast -- 4 or 5 of these disks won't cost you more than 500 USD for the lot and they need no extra power so you can plug them into a laptop if you want to restore your backup to a laptop's hard disk.
You can also get fixed SATA hard drives 1TB for around 100 USD. Hard disks are CHEAP / DIRT CHEAP these days.
Forget magnetic tape too expensive and overkill for non-corporate type of operations and Blue Ray -- too slow for normal backup - note not archive - see later in this post.
Now Archiving is another matter --by all means archive off your hard disk backups to Blue Ray --quite a sensible idea in fact and store one copy off site.
Note when doing any backup ALWAYS backup to 2 sets of media and DO TEST A RESTORE FROM TIME TO TIME. The backup will often work without error but you might find all sorts of errors on a restore.
Use a decent commercial backup software package such as acronis (http://www.acronis.com) or similar. These only cost around 50 - 70 USD , handle incremental backups (i.e save the CHANGES since the last backup) and can automatically span media i.e prompts you to insert / connect new media when the current one is full.
Note also that RAID has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with backup or archiving.
Finally also to re-iterate again please understand the difference between ARCHIVE and BACKUP. If you are worried that your hard disks will fail over a long period then you have mis-understood the difference between backup and permanent archive.
You shouldn't use HD's for permanent archive -- as explained in the post use these for backups --maybe save several generations of backups but then copy the backups you've made to BLU Ray DVD's as your archives and reuse the disks again. You can schedule the archives to run whenever you like but say weekly probably would be fine.
Your Backups should really be run daily -- at least an incremental backup should be run daily and a new full backup run weekly.
There is no point in archiving an incremental backup to DVD (Blu ray or whatever) as the restore would require the DVD's from the last FULL backup plus all the intervening incremental backups. A Horrendous nightmare if you have a lot of data.
Restoring from a full backup however is fine -- you can even do a "Bare metal restore" if you create bootable media from the backup products from companies such as acronis (http://www.acronis.com) or similar.
Final remark here
Of course once you've created your backup you can run the archive any time so you can even run this during your normal "daily" work processing --run as a background job.
I agree 100% with Kyle on this. I've gotten really spoiled on the mini external hard drives - I've got two of them so far, for 500 gigs total with a cost of under $200. I also have 8 to 10 of the larger external drives, but I'm leaning more toward the smaller ones for size reasons. ( They fit perfectly in my safe deposit box at my bank ).
Storage is so cheap now that I just shrug my head when I hear of people losing data from not backing up - makes no sense at all to me )
Regards
Tom
