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Re: [ARSCLIST] Digital AUdio File Backups
At 02:44 PM 2008-07-18, Wasserman, Robert A - WHS wrote:
We were recently told by IT here that we may lose our space on the
server and our hard drives are also getting full soon. So here are my
questions:
You really need to find an IT department that can provide a trusted
digital repository and leave it at that... But, short of that
solution, comments follow below.
1: What good or bad experiences have people had with extracting digital
audio files from server backup tapes?
If the IT department is not able to provide for your storage needs, I
worry about their backups as well. What tape technology are they
using? So far, the best large-scale tape format appears to be LTO. In
fact, it appears to be the only one with significant traction in the
marketplace moving forward. If the tape is LTO, I would worry less
than if it were something else.
2: Assuming a digital audio file made it onto more than one backup tape
(stored in different locations) before being taken off a server, can we
trust these multiple backup tapes as our ONLY copies?
I don't know if I would, but your LaCie drives also still have copies.
3: What is the guideline these days on digital audio file backups? Is
having 2 copies, one on a server, one that is backed up to tape enough?
Should we keep a gold CDR/DVDR even with the other 2 copies existing?
Considering the massive amounts of data that are being generated by
all manner of digital archiving (audio, video, scanned images, etc.),
I think optical media is too small, too time-consuming,
space-consuming, and costly for backups. Yes, it will probably last
if you use gold pthalocyanine dye disks for CDs or equivalent gold DVD-Rs.
4:Now that people have been using gold CDR's for awhile now, has anyone
lost a file on a gold CDR due to scratches or other damage, and having a
backup CDR would have or did solve this file problem?
I have only had some issues with silver pthalocyanine dye disks that
have been in my car for 7 years off-and-on and then only in the car
player (which may be an issue) and they've been kept in wallets
rather than jewel cases. Everything I've pulled off CD-R (and
surprisingly DAT tapes) in my archives has come back with no
noticeable degradation. (I'm not recommending DATs for archival
storage, but they were available before CD-R).
I have a theory that if you're using hard drives three copies with
one off-site should be adequate. If you are using RAID-5 NAS boxes
then two copies with one off-site should be adequate. I do not
propagate deletes from one NAS to the other.
For the volume of stuff we need to store today, I think the
multi-slot RAID-5 appliances make most other storage media obsolete.
Both Netgear and Thecus ( www.netgear.com and www.thecus.com ) have
excellent products. Thecus wins a bit on price/performance ratio and
is faster than the Netgear.
I have a pair of Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with 4x500 GB drives providing
about 1.3 TiB of available RAID-5-protected storage. I also recently
purchased a pair of Thecus N5200Pro with 4x1000 GB drives providing
about 2.6 TiB of available RAID-5 protected storage. I can add
another 1000 GB drive to each and then rebuild the RAIDs for a
maximum of about 3.5 TiB of storage.
With these added drives, I would have about 4.8 TiB (about 5.5 TB) of
storage in two appliances. I can add another 1.3 TiB (1.5 TB) of
storage by changing out the Netgear units' 500 GB drives with 1000 GB
drives, but the cost per added GB is high with this method.
The trigger for this upgrade right now is that one of my sons was
looking for a summer job and proposed scanning our family negatives,
so we're doing 18 MB files from each negative and 36 MB files from
some of my higher-quality slides. We probably have about 50 000
images all told to scan, dating from the 1950s (and a few before).
I'm expecting the scanning project to generate about 1.6-1.8 TiB of
data. We have about 0.92 TiB of data on the server going into this,
plus the in-process audio work on the Netgear NAS pair.
One pair of servers is located off-site at the end of a fibre optic
cable and backup routines run every night using www.tgrmn.com ViceVersaPro.
Cheers,
Richard
Richard L. Hess email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.