Offline Storage for Hard Drives?

rrsipov asks: "I work at a small company that processes a good deal of DV (mainly) format video. After trying a number of different technologies we have settled down to using removable hard drives for file storage and backup. When a set of projects are complete, the hard disk they are stored on can be removed and stored offline so that the material is available in for possible future use. The problem is that unlike tapes, etc... we haven't been able to find any good storage cabinet type solutions, and have resorted to a pretty much ad-hoc system of filing the drives. Does Slashdot know of any such system? Ideally we'd like to start with something small, and scale from there if we like the system."

Comments

Bulk pack boxes

[Omega Hacker]

If you're just storing bare drives, try to get ahold of the shipping boxes that manufacturers send 20-packs in. If you're storing that many drives, they're probably going to be the most efficient and safest way to do it. If you're *buying* drives in that quantity, or can consider doing so in the future, you can probably manage to make sure you'll get the box too. You might be able to scam them off of local computer stores too. You could probably glue a laminated sheet of paper to it with a template and [dry|wet]-erase mark what's in each slot on the outside. Make sure you have plenty of good-condition static bags though.

Why not tapes...?

[tooth]

I'd re-evaluate tapes... a HDD depends on both the magnet medium and the conected electronics. With a tape, the medium is seperated from the physical components that make it go (The other advantage is that tapes can be read in by anyone to recover data, where as a HDD would need a clean room). Tapes are slower to read data back from, but if the HDDs are stored offline like you are, then this isn't an issue. By the sounds of it, once it's on your offline HDDs you are removing it from your servers. I'd be pretty nervous about that and recomend that you make at least two copies in case one fails. If you want to be serious about you should use an off-site storage facillity, and a comercial storage facility would probably only deal with tapes.

Re:Why not tapes...?

[TheLink]

" a HDD depends on both the magnet medium and the conected electronics. With a tape, the medium is seperated from the physical components that make it go"

Uh, isn't that a significant minus for tapes. Especially since tapes aren't much cheaper than HDDs. And tape drives are very expensive.

If you've bought an LTO3 tape drive, and LTO4 tapes become cheap, you don't get a free LTO4 drive with each LTO4 tape.

Whereas if you have been using 250GB SATA drives as backup media, when 400GB SATA drives become cheap, you can switch to using them as backup media.

I forsee that SATA is more likely to be around and easily available longer than LTO3 will (or whatever tape standard). Look how long PATA and SCSI have been around and compare with DDS3, DDS4 etc.

So years later, as long as I have a SATA interface, I can still read from an old SATA drive which should have had rather little wear and tear if kept under controlled conditions.

Whereas LTOx or DDSx tape drives might be quite rare and even more expensive. Even if the HDDs physical stuff seizes up, finding someone who can recover your data from the platters will be not much harder than finding someone with a working DDS4 tape drive.

Also, if you use HDD as backup media, you can do backups/restores to/from more than one HDD at the same time. Multiple HDDs are much cheaper than multiple tape drives.

Advantages of using tape:
You can drop a tape onto a carpeted floor without much worry.

Tape autoloaders are more common than HDD autoloaders ;). So if you will have massive amounts of offline data, you have to go for tape.

Re:Shelf life?

[pontifier]

I've wondered that myself. I have a bunch of drives that for one reason or another I'm not using, but they still have important stuff on them. do I need to spin them up once in a while, or should I just hope that years down the line they still work?

Re:Shelf life?

[TERdON]

Oops, sorry, forgot that. Yes, it worked. But it felt slower than a floppy disk (!). And the storage capacity was already then just a tenth of a CR-RW, cheaply available...

I still have it anyway. Hopefully I might be able to sell it as an antique or something when I get old... :)

Re:The El Cheapo solution

[dolo724]

Make sure they're protected well from the elements.

If you pack them in salt, the cured drives could last for several years. A little spice, and the data will have just the right flavor when the drives are finally used.

The ancient Egyptians used ceremonial drives prepared in special enbalming fluids to accompany their kings on the journey to the afterlife. Little wooden server rooms on the ceremonial boats gave hope to the SysAdmin^H^H^H^H^H^HScribes of everlasting employment. If the drive wieghed more than a feather upon the king's judgement, he would be required to spend time slaving for the BOFH before ascension.