Archiving file ideas
We have Disktracker and a backup of DVD's with all our projects...as the projects get bigger we started backing up on a (external) TB drive....is there other options? The tape systems seem to be only for PC? Looking to find solutions for archiving projects, with a data base to access them if need to go back.
Comments
There's a tape backup drive available for Thunderbolt now:
http://www.mlogic.com/products/mtape
It's a bit expensive at $3600 but the costs would get less over time as each 2.5TB tape is ~$40:
http://www.amazon.com/HP-Ultrium-C7976A-6-25-Cartridge/dp/B00AHQUV3S
A 32TB Pegasus RAID is $4600:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/HE155VC/B/promise-pegasus2-r8-32tb-8-by-4tb-thunderbolt-2-raid-system
So for the same $4600, you'd get $1,000 of tapes (25 tapes = 62.5TB) along with the $3600 drive. The tapes don't have redundancy but they also aren't liable to hardware failure like the drives.
A cheaper option is Blu-Ray (25-50GB per disc) but it would take ages to burn the discs for large projects - the data rates are around 50MB/s tops for consumer drives and it's a good idea to do a verify step so half that. There's a review of the mtape here that says writes were around 120-200MB/s so easily 3-4x faster than Blu-Ray and more easily rewritable vs write once:
http://www.larryjordan.biz/product-review-mtape-from-mlogic/
I actually think the best solution will be SSD eventually but the prices are holding those back. $0.10 per GB and you get 36TB of potentially GB/s read/write speeds for $3600. Right now, the prices are $0.40-0.50/GB. Plus you would be better having redundant storage to allow for failures. With tapes being passive, it's mainly just the drive you'd worry about failing and the data would be more secure.