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There's quite a few companies who've built their business around safe records storage.

Iron Mountain
Recall

These guys will store almost anything you want to pay them to. Documents, Hard drives, Tapes, paintings.... etc They can send an armored vehicle/courier to your source location to pick up the content.

Though if you have only a few HD, a safety deposit box at your local bank should suffice.

Lastly, encrypt it and upload it to Amazon S3's Glacier service. Heck you could upload it to a bunch of different Regions in case all of East Coast region is nuked.

I am spinning up an offsite backup/archive company. I plan to offer annual data backup plans. I'll bill you and send you a flash device for your data, which will be loaded to a server that hashes it and uses some other processes to protect the data integrity.

I am considering offering an escrow service where data can be released to a third party when certain criteria are met. The site is empty now, but check back to find out more, http://www.o2ark.com./

First off: sounds like a good idea.
Second: It's going to need a LOT of work. I'm not going to send some random person a flash device with my data on it, even in encrypted form. The service is going to require not just escrow but a pretty heavy bond; basically, you're going to have to set yourself up like a bank. Then there's the issue of jurisdiction. If you're in the US, there's no way I'm going to trust my data to your server, when it's been shown that government WILL step in and look at things just because they can. Other countries aren't much better; they just don't have a Snowden leak. to back things up. Compared to this, fully offline safety deposit boxes have a ton of legal precedent to prevent third party snoopers.
Third: You're going to be competing with data protection behemoth Iron Mountain. Are you up for that?

LTO tape is $50/400GB ($125/TB) - PAINFULLY SLOW, SEMI CHEAP
Disk is approx $150/2TB ($75/TB) - CHEAPEST AND PRETTY FAST
S3 is $153/TB/mo + xfer fees - SLOW, NOT CHEAP

Buying your own harddrives and storing them yourself is the cheapest option and probably will have very good retention. Since you're doing this frequently, it seems that it might be worth it to buy a SATA SAN that you can mount several drives in and a *bunch* of SATA drives. Put in 3-4 drives, raid them, copy your data (might take a while). Put the drives somewhere safe. If this is customer data, you can charge them a fee for data retention, so you don't have to eat the whole cost, but you'll have to put some money into the platform to begin with. If you roll your own, ZFS might be a better option instead of Linux's software raid because you can turn on compression and move data around if you need to. Getting something going with hot-plug drives (a PC chassis or SAN or whatnot) might also be a good investment. You may be able to re-use the drives after a while. Drive costs will also drop over time and you'll be able to buy 4TB and 8TB drives for the same price in a year or less too. After a year or two, we're talking a few bucks to store this amount of data on your own, fast media.

As far as storage, a safety deposit box will only work for so many drives. Might look into http://www.ironmountain.com/ for secure off-site storage, or just encrypt the data and take it home (off-site) with your or one of your employees so it's physically in more than one location.

I have a friend who works here, they might be 1 possibility? http://www.ironmountain.com/digital-archiving/digital-archiving-services.html

Example: Peak10 works with Iron Mountain for backups of hundreds of servers. You would need to supply hardware.

yes, it's slow and abysmal. However it's still the best that we've got in terms of space and cost. Like all other media, don't just throw it in a box and hope for the best, though.

Honestly, if it's worth the price, I'd go with a place like Iron Mountain. They have pricing plans per GB of online storage.

There are Vendors such as Iron Mountain that will do this. Of course it will be at the government 'discount' of twice the price as normal, but at least they be bound by contract to not tamper with tapes.

It's pretty obvious that most slashdot readers either can't read the article they are replying to or don't understand the logistics of physical media storage.

You mentioned physical space requirements and organization being one issue but another issue you did not mention is physical security. If you just have a bunch of shelves from ikea lining the office what is stopping someone from just grabbing some CDs and walking off with them? Best bet would be offsite storage and I would recomend Iron Mountain. We maintain over 100,000 full home closing documents with them at any given time and when doing a CBA between their fees and what we would spend on warehouse space and staff it's a no brainer. Since your husband is doing this work for clients I would just pass the fee onto them as a billable expense.

Keep in mind, offsite storage facilities charge money for collection, monthly storage and media retrieval. Retrieval can take up to 3 days, but many offer emergency retrieval that can get you your stuff within a couple hours for a premium. That's why it's good to keep electronic versions on site, which your husband already does.

Cardboard boxes and folders are not a longterm viable option.

Companies like Iron Mountain, Lucid Information Systems, Managed Backup and Data Electronics all offer the ability to pay someone else to worry about your backups.

These comanies will manage your backups for you.... so you can sleep easy.... Just another possibility...

I think it's more of a cost issue. Storing hardcopies is a lot more expensive than storing electronic documents, and there's a greater perceived risk of noncompliance (being able to recover a document on demand). Every time you want to get a file box out of storage at an Iron Mountain type archival facility, it costs money and takes time; the cost of recovering one more document from online storage is pretty low (virtually zero if it's truly online storage, slightly higher if it's in a nearline or offline backup). And most modern companies have the electronic recordkeeping and computer equipment anyway, so the fixed costs are already paid for.

The fact that you can satisfy Sarbanes-Oxley with hardcopies doesn't mean that it's something that companies want to do; I'll bet you can satisfy S-O with stone tablets or microfiche, but nobody is going to do either of those if they possibly can avoid them.

Unless you're the BOfH, in which case you have a tape safe. But you can't use that to store tapes - its not climate controlled

http://www.ironmountain.com/services/svc3.asp?svc1 _content=2&svc2_code=5&svc3_key=211

but ever tried to read a 10-year-od tape on a new machine?

Yes. DLT.

As far as electronic vaulting, Iron Mountain is the leader in the industry. They are also the leader in offsite data protection. The company is very interesting, having been founded shortly after WWII during the cold war era, they built a huge underground facility which was literally a miniature city underground, the idea being that in the event of a nuclear war, all the top executives and financial leaders from banks and other federal institutions would be relocated to the secure facility, where backup mainframes and copies of all the data would allow the federal reserve to continue to operate during nuclear winter.

The company I work for uses them for offsiting tapes, but the e-vaulting option looks appealing and we may start doing that. Some of the highlights of the e-vaulting solution they offer are AES-256 encryption, a native client for Linux, Windows, Unix, and just about any other platform, and a proven track record when it comes to data protection. Find out more here: Link to click on

Also, if you're interested in reading the fascinating history of Iron Mountain, I found this article especially interesting to read.

Although pricey, IronMountain offers excellent service in this backup genre.

http://www.ironmountain.com/Index.asp

I highly recommend them if you can afford it.

Aside from that, if you are a smaller shop hit up freshmeat/sourceforge for projects like Bacula and BackupPC...they work well for smaller installs.

don't use Iron Mountain

besides, would you really trust critical stuff to someone who uses .asp?

Iron Mountain was also very quick to recommend data excryption...this press release from the same day as the Ameritrade release...

Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM) is advising its customers that current, commonly used disaster recovery processes do not address increased requirements for protecting personal information from inadvertent disclosure. In recent months, several companies have disclosed incidents that may have compromised personal information. While most of these cases involved malicious, online identity theft, some of the events were due to the accidental loss of computer backup tapes.

Few companies bother to encrypt their backup tapes, which needs to change.

Don't feel slammed because they see an easy target. Your sentence is grammatically balanced; funding such a project WOULD be really important and contributive. It was your detractors who sought to insert injustice, and I think they are caffeinated, or worse, sleep deprived. You and I know Bill Gates isn't responsible for the lame-ass products his company delivers/promises. He just owns the company. It's the lame-ass M$ engineers who are to blame.

Bill Gates does plenty of worthy things with the PHAT $$$ his company has liberated from millions of (l)users and this would be a fabulous project for he and Iron Mountain.

During the early 2000's an idea like this had already surfaced during the much hyped Storage Service Provider (SSP) rush. While most companys like the now defunct StorageNetworks (NASDAQ:STOR) were just building massive terabyte clusters into CoLo's around the country one provider Digital Knox was creating a system very similar to the OceanStore concepts from Berkeley. The idea was not using P2P however since this required users to volunteer space. Simply put take the idea of a RAID array with parity and instead of drives think CoLo. Now that the data is spread across multiple centers having just one go down will not effectively kill it. The only draw back of course is time to recover the data which would be slower but far more resiliant to natural disasters (hurricanes, terrorist attacks, etc).
These ideas were published in a book, written by former CTO of DigitalKnox, "Fundamentals of Secure SAN" although the book isn't available yet. The biggest problem of course is the fact that most clients do not like sending their sensitive data to others. For this reason an additional layer of obscurity was added in the form of EFS. This would allow for non RAND type storage to remain secret even from the storage provider. More importantly it eased concerns that *other clients* of the storage service could somehow sneak a peek at their data.
The problems only multiply at this point since now key escrow and remote searching become an issue. The speed tradeoff seemed accetable to many but only for long term storage. The problem hasn't gone away obviously but the market dropped off the face of the planet. One of the only major survivors was Iron Mountain who not only stores your data online but will keep backup tapes in secure vault locations around the country.

True, but I've had tapes go bad on me and become unreadable too. Others have posted about having tape drives eat tapes and destroy them. Any real numbers out there on the reliability of tapes on the shelf versus drives on the shelf?

I have been casually looking into using an offsite backup service (like Iron Mountain). Does anyone have any real experience?

Uh, 1-800-IRON MOUNTAIN

http://www.ironmountain.com/

Until the early 1980s, DEC used to have its own underground facility. I think it was in Burlington, MA, if memory serves. It was then sold to Iron Mountain.

Tough to find pictures of these things.. they don't exactly want to draw attention to themselves.

Make sure that you have a good offsite backup system. I would suggest on a professional outfit like Iron Mountain (formerly Arcus). Be sure to run through some sort of disaster recovery simulation at least annually. The worst thing is having to re-build a datacenter from nothing after a disaster. You may be able to re-build the center, but the data is the really hard part.

Fort Knox Escrow was purchased by Iron Mountain. Appears that DSI Technology Escrow Services handles that stuff now.

We use Iron Mountain for an off-site location for storing our backup tapes, but they're pricey and certainly overkill for home backups.

Being a sysadmin who always gets stuck specializing in backups, I recommend the following solution for a (relatively) low budget backup solution on Windows. Please note that this system ignores trying to get the users to do this themselves, because users will never do anything right.

1- Get all users off of Windows 98 and onto Windows 2000. Do NOT go to Windows XP. Having all your systems on one OS will make troubleshooting backup (Among others.) problems much easier, and having the systems on a better OS will help ensure that backups actually run right.

2- Get all of the systems on a Windows 2000 domain on which they have NO administrative privileges. This keeps users from screwing around with backup software and options.

3- Buy Veritas Backup Exec as well as the open file option (~$900 USD).Read the manual before you use it. If the company to spring for training, get trained. Set it up a server that won't mind the extra load.

You may notice that other companies sell other backup solutions. In a Windows environment, stick with Veritas. Veritas wrote the backup software built into Windows. Veritas works with Microsoft to make their product work well with Windows. Veritas also has what is, IMHO, some of the best software support out there.

4- First thing every morning, grab a cup of coffe and go through last night's backup logs. Keep a written journal of all failures and irregularities (A nice spreadsheet is userful as well.). This will help track errors.

5- Do test restores often! You don't want to do all this and find out that you cannot restore data properly!

6- Store backup tapes off site! Find out if Iron Mountain has a facility nearby and if so, USE IT. 99% (Yes, 99%!) of all lost data is caused by fires. Earthquakes and floods are not far behind. Nothing will wipe out a small site like a big fire that takes backup tapes with it.

7- Put together a good disaster recovery plan and try it out on test machines once a year or so. Aside from keeping you ready for a disaster (Imagine if you had been a sysadmin in the World Trade center, survived the disaster, kept fine backups off-site, but had no idea how to bring the systems back up from nothing but tapes!), it will keep you ready for small disasters (ie your domain controller's raid array croaks and corrupts all the disks on the way to the graveyard.) as well.

Hope this helps. And remember, most importantly - users are stupid assholes. The reason you get paid to dick around with computers all day is because users are stupid assholes, and can't use a computer without fucking things up. Making them backing up data is not your job; backing it up no matter what they think is!

Since you did not state a retrieval time or storage/retention needs, I am going to offer to scenarios; one for long term, fast access storage, one for short term and/or slow access storage.

Storing 8TB/day for a long time with quick access would probably require a tape silo, which is essentially a tape library the size of a small house. StorageTek is one of the leaders in silos (And might be the only vendor making them these days.), and they make some pretty nice stuff. Their PowderHorn 9310 is a nice model for bulk storage and quick recovery. A downside to the silos is that they do not often handle DLT tapes, which can make it hard to use tapes outside of the library.

If you do not need fast access to the data, and have time to root through tapes for restores, just get a smaller tape library (Anything in the 50-100 tape range from ATL/Quantum Adic or Qualtstar running SuperDLT drives controlled by Veritas Netbackup would give you an easy way to handle all the data. NetBackup has excellent archiving capabilites (IE record data, wipe data from disk.), works on just about any platform out there, scales well, and keeps files in GNUTar format for easy access. As for storing the tapes themselves, if you have a small retention time just keep around a few hundred tapes to cycle through. If you need to store the data for a long time, get a few thousand tapes and a set of nice shelves to keep them on. If you do not have somewhere to store them, Iron Mountain does a great job storing data, I have worked with them before and toured one of their facilities, and I can vouch that they do a great job storing data.