Long Term Storage

[cms86]

So a little background. I am a Director/Editor by trade and felt I had a good idea on this solution. I have 3 Raid 10's at around 6TB in size full of footage from years past. Granted the footprint of these enclosures isnt too bad but still looking for other viable options. Should I just buy single 6TB Drives? outsourcing them to tape drives?  Honestly open to suggestions.

[DiamondShark286]

if you can get a cheap server and get archive drives with an ssd cache archive drives are cheap but have slow write speeds but faster read speeds just make the ssd cache flush to the hard drives nightly or every few hours or get rid of it if you don't care about write speeds(not recomended)

[Zeras]

If you are using the raid for data storage, meaning you are not working directly on it, and you really want to make sure you retain the data at all costs, I would consider additional backups of both your data and your backups.

 

If you got the raid system and planned to work directly on it, then I would consider getting two 6GB backup drives for each raid you have.  One backup you would keep onsite that would backup nightly using something that only backs up files that have been modified (ex: robocopy on windows or rsync on linux/macos).  Then I would keep one backup secured offsite that you bring in periodically to create a long term backup.  

 

If you have your raid system and one layer of backup storage, you are protected in case your raid fails to rebuild after losing a drive.  However, if your equipment is stolen or it is damaged via natural disaster, fire, etc. you will likely lose everything without the offsite backup.

 

One thing I have learned over the years is if you cannot afford to lose data, don't rely on one backup and don't keep all of the data in the same physical location any longer than necessary.