Data storage for video files

[Martin]

I’ve been shooting digital for five years and tend to keep the data from my camera cards for my major clients. I now have 18TB of data stored on 7 X 2TB firewire drives and some smaller ones. The Cloud is not an option for backup, wondering if anyone has a suggestion to back up that much data?
Thanks

[Barry]

While I am not an expert in storage I thought I would suggest something as no one has answered.

 

Since your business sounds like it is going well.you might be looking to go up a level.

 

At first I thought a server, which is meant for more than one person to access but does not have to be.  Don't know th cost.  Here is an article I found

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/251993/how_to_choose_a_server_for_your_small_business.html

 

I also found a forum where someone asked a similar question to yours and received various replies and options.  I did not understand all of it but it addresses your question

 

http://serverfault.com/questions/202313/cost-effective-long-term-archival-of-video-and-image-data-50-tb

 

I found that one by googling when you need to store terabytes of video for your business

 

I hope this gets you started toward a solution

 

Thanks

Barry

[Martin]

Barry – thanks. I'll check your links out.

Appreciated

[harmser]

Hi Martin,

 

Barry gave you a lot of good advice with those articles.  One of the best options is a NAS (network attached storage) server as they are relatively inexpensive, provide easy access to your data without messing with connection and power cables, and your data is backed up (via a parity disk) in case one of the drives fails.  Lime Technology sells 40TB server for $1,100 if you go here http://lime-technology.com/sb/, which includes everything but the hard drives, which you can add as your needs grow.  For the 18TB, you'll need to invest about another $1K for the NAS HDD drives.  Other NAS solutions I would look at are Synology's 8-bay Disk Station http://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-Diskless-Network-Attached/dp/B0078RETQE%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAICE7LOAJMK3SSLPA%26tag%3Dp00935-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB0078RETQE

and the Drobo B800FS http://www.droboworks.com/Drobo-B800FS.asp.

 

Like Barry says, these don't need to be on a shared system, even though they are often used that way within an office environment.

[Martin]

Harmser,

Many thanks. The NAS looks like a good solution. Do you need to buy specific hard drives? I have seen these before and I always get tricked when they say 30TB storage, but hard drives not included. I have 7 x 2TB OWC Raid drives – maybe these can be re-used?

Anyway – I'll look into them further.

Thanks

[Mike Wilhelm]

Martin-

Eventually LTO becomes a viable option. The tapes are cheap ($35 for 1.5TB), but the drives are super expensive (around $15k), so you'll have to do some math on at what point that wouls make sense for you.

[harmser]

Hi Martin,

 

On some of the RAID solutions, you do have to buy specific hard drives and they have to be all the same size and brand.  The Lime Technology unRAID server is very hardware independent.  There's a list of compatible drives here http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware_Compatibility#Hard_Drives, but the site says that this list is not exhaustive.  You might try posting a question about your drive on the forum http://lime-technology.com/forum/ and get your answer.

[Author]

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