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300 gigabytes in the size of a DVD?
Rollie Hawk writes "Although storage space is no longer the premium it once was, physical backups and external media have been slow to catch up. While recordable DVDs may be fine for backing up a single workstation, large servers are still forced to rely on swappable drives and tape backups. But holographic disc technology could be changing all of that in the very near future. Holographic Versatile Discs (HVDs) have been in the works for some time now by various companies, including InPhase Technologies (formerly part of Lucent) and Japan's Optware (which claimed to have made the first recording of a movie on a holographic disc last year). InPhase's HVDs, scheduled for release in 2006, are said to hold 300GB of data, 60 times that of a conventional DVD with only a slight increase in size. That translates to more than a day's worth of HD-quality video. Not to mention the drives themselves can read and write at ten times the speed a normal DVD drive. One of InPhase's partners in HVD research, Maxell, is working towards even more storage on a 1.6TB disc."
Turner Network Television recently aired a commercial off of the InPhase Tapestry drive. Maxell built that drive for InPhase.
Data backup has become very expensive for some of my customers. The amount of data a company of even minimal size (50 employees) goes through in a day blows my mind. We've been investing every option but none are cost effective (except when a hard drive goes).
My dilemma is that as backup storage (such as the HVD) gets bigger, it seems that hard drives quickly outpace the new form of backup storage. 1.6TB discs sound great, yet I'm weary of having that much data on an easy to break/burn/steal disc. 300GB is more feasible as I can see making a few copies of the backup "just in case."
Nonetheless, the write speeds listed don't seem all that great, and what interfaces will let us copy data at those speeds? Moving 1.6TG of data off of a server without slowing down user access (24 hours per day with offshore employees) sounds like it will still take hours and hours to back up (if not longer). A recovery stage would take even longer.
For now, I'm happiest with redundancy backups. I don't like mirroring or RAIDx/y or clusters (too many nightmares over the 15 years I've worked with all of it), but having a server dupe itself daily has given us the best turnover and safety margins we've seen, as well as being very cost effective compared to use-once media or (shudder) tapes.
Hmm, maybe now they can put the entire Lord of the Rings Triliogy on one disc. now, if you want to put in the extra features, that is a different story...
I'm a little confused by some of the responses I'm seeing here. It seems most people think that this new technology would be a bad thing? The largest complaint I've seen so far is: "What if I lose the disk?" I don't know about you guys, but for me this isn't much different then anything else in the world. If your backup is important... don't lose it!
If needed, I have some handy solutions to solve the "How do I not lose my disk" problem.
1. Put it some place that you can remember.
2. If it's super important, make two backups.
3. Tie a string around your finger to remind you to always remember where you put your disk.
4. Ask somebody more responsible than yourself to watch over it for you.
And if none of these work...
5. Buy a small cable. Run the cable through the hole in the center of the disk. Buy a small padlock. Padlock the cable around a large object. Make multiple copies of the padlock key and tape them in various places.
Obviously this is not practical, but it is about as practical as thinking that a new technology is bad because you might misplace it.