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jabaro · Apr 13, 2005, 09:46 AM

What are people using for long-term archival backup storage? I have hundreds of GB on my internal drives that I need to clear off to make room for new projects, but I don't want to loose that material.

I've been looking into the alternatives and each seems to have pros and cons. Large internal or external hard drives are cheap, but I've had too many crash and die to feel really secure with them. Same concerns with network hard drives. Anything that's online and on all the time is bound to fail sooner or later. Tape drives are expensive and inconvenient. DVD-Rs are what I'm using now, but for video projects they are just too small. It takes forever to compress and segment an archive with StuffIt and I still end up with a stack of discs. Dual-layer DVDs would be better. But I've heard mixed opinions on how long recordable optical media last.

Are there any other alternatives? What's the best solution?

John

CatOne · Apr 13, 2005, 11:19 AM

Originally posted by jabaro:
What are people using for long-term archival backup storage? I have hundreds of GB on my internal drives that I need to clear off to make room for new projects, but I don't want to loose that material.

I've been looking into the alternatives and each seems to have pros and cons. Large internal or external hard drives are cheap, but I've had too many crash and die to feel really secure with them. Same concerns with network hard drives. Anything that's online and on all the time is bound to fail sooner or later. Tape drives are expensive and inconvenient. DVD-Rs are what I'm using now, but for video projects they are just too small. It takes forever to compress and segment an archive with StuffIt and I still end up with a stack of discs. Dual-layer DVDs would be better. But I've heard mixed opinions on how long recordable optical media last.

Are there any other alternatives? What's the best solution?

John

DVDs are typically not archival -- the ones you burn use dyes to hold the data (unlike the ones you buy produced with contents, which are actually "burned.").

I would recommend an external hard drive, that you connect occasionally. It's not going to crash when it's turned off ;-) I have an external firewire HD, and I have ChronoSync set up to synch changed data whenever it's plugged in. So once a week, I plug it in, 30 GB or whatever gets copied over, and I unmount it and put it back in the closet. You can set it to not propagate deletes (meaning if you delete it from your HD, it won't delete it from the backup if you don't want it to).

Works well, and HDs are in general a lot more reliable than DVDs. Tapes are way too expensive for a home user, are less reliable than hard drives, and are horribly slow to restore from.

sworthy · Apr 13, 2005, 11:25 AM

...and because even large hard drives have such a good GB/$ value just get two. Have a backup and back it up with another hard drive (can you RAID external firewire drives?). The chance for hardware failure on two drives that you only turn on for backups is pretty slim. If one goes you'll have time to go get another one.

jabaro · Apr 13, 2005, 12:45 PM

I am familiar with the difference between DVD-R and those commercially produced. Commercial DVDs and CDs are really permanent (relatively so). I've had those produced, but only for large-scale production, in the thousands. There are typically fixed costs associated with a production run which makes it cost-effective only for large quantities. Has anybody used commercial duplication for archival purposes? Is there a way to create that type of disc for a reasonable price?

Mojo · Apr 13, 2005, 06:53 PM

I think having two or more external drives is the best compromise when comparing price/convenience/risk. If you look at any digital media currently available you will find a potential for failure. So if your requirement is 100% reliability you might as well save yourself time and trouble and give up now. Otherwise, accept that while some risk is inevitable it can be mitigated to the point where it is virtually nonexistent. And then stop worrying about it.

OreoCookie · Apr 14, 2005, 06:42 AM

Every possible method to do backups has pros and cons. Harddrive backups are getting increasingly common, especially for the average user, because tape drives with interesting capacities are prohibitively expensive.

euphras · Apr 14, 2005, 07:50 AM

Are there any other alternatives? What's the best solution?

For my mission critical stuff i use an old SCSI rig equipped with 4 18GB server SCSI HDDs (IBM DDYS-T18350). These HDDs are meant to run 24/7 and provide safer storage than the whole IDE/ATA, S-ATA crap, when turned on only occasionally. I had encountered several dying IDE drives over the past years but NEVER a dying SCSI drive. When i get more psychotic about safeness i might switch to mirrored RAID.

Pic: Quadra 950

jabaro · Apr 14, 2005, 10:04 AM

SCSI drives would be a great alternative. I always liked SCSI drives and was sad to see them disappear from Macs. But their cost is prohibitive, over $4.00 per GB for high-capacity drives. A 300 GB Seagate SCSI drive is $1260! Plus the fact that Macs no longer have built-in SCSI. I don't think you can even buy a SCSI card for G5s.

A friend of mine in the video production business recommended low-cost internal ATA/IDE drives with an external firewire or USB enclosure that can be used to swap drives in and out. Depending on the capacity, these drives are only around $0.50-$0.60 per GB (a 250 GB Seagate is $140) and an enclosure is less than $50. For that price I could have multiple backups and still pay far less than a SCSI system. And using internal IDE drives is about half the cost of buying external firewire drives.

OreoCookie · Apr 15, 2005, 04:21 AM

I agree. Even professional backup systems often use ATA drives. If you want to make things more secure, put it in an old computer (Mac or PC) and make a RAID1 (mirroring of two identical drives). That should be plenty for large amounts of data. In addition to that, I also keep important docs on DVDs.

Mojo · Apr 16, 2005, 01:31 AM

My 250GB 8MB buffer Western Digital drive cost $.31 per gigabyte. I am floored at how inexpensive drives are these days.

jabaro · Apr 17, 2005, 12:09 PM

I ended up ordering three Seagate ATA drives and an AMS Venus USB/Firewire enclosure. After a lot of looking around, I found a $50 rebate at Amazon on the Seagate 200 GB drive and a $50 rebate at Outpost.com on the Seagate 300 GB drive. I also got a second 300 GB drive. In case anyone is interested the Amazon rebate expires today and the Outpost rebate expires on 4/21.

Apfhex · Apr 17, 2005, 05:35 PM

What might be a good drive (brand, Parallel ATA, SATA, Ultra DMA, what?) and enclosure to get? I'd like to have something better than CD-R/DVD-R's for backing up my PowerBook's data, and I don't need anything huge, maybe 80GB at the smallest would be great. Those drives on Outpost are so cheap, but I don't know what enclosures would match.

jabaro · Apr 17, 2005, 05:59 PM

I chose Seagate drives because they have a reputation for reliability and a 5-year warranty. They make 3.5-inch ATA and SATA drives. None of the enclosures I found supported SATA, so that choice was simple. Pretty much any enclosure for 3.5-inch drives would work - some have USB, some firewire, and some have both. I chose the AMS enclosure because it was aluminum (not plastic), had a fan, and had the Oxford 911 firewire chipset (can use as a boot drive on Mac).

nica · Apr 18, 2005, 09:03 AM

Don�t forget that keep a copy offsite many people have one hard drive backing another but fail to have a copy offsite and when the place burns or floods the two copies are worth $0.