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The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies
A new study shows that storing the digital master record of a film costs much more than storing archival prints. "To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master. Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is 'born digital' -- that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film -- pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault."
Someone who cares ought to come up with a method of transferring digital information to celluloid so that it can be stored with the cheaper storage costs. I'm not talking about a print, but storing binary files on film. A 70mm reel ought to hold a ton of properly formatted digital data and error correction.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
It is not just buying another drive
$300/TB, currently.
power for the drive(s)
Approaching zero (minus a few hours per year for making a copy) if you store them offline.
power for the server(s) using the drive(s)
Ditto.
costs of the backup architecture for DR
A minimum-wage drive-jockey and a handful of PCs with EZ-Swap drive cages.
costs of cooling the datacenter housing all of the above
AKA "the dry and somewhat temperature controlled (40-110F) basement of any office building in the world"
maintenance agreement costs for all of the above
See "minimum-wage drive jockey" and add a broom.
costs related to the admins who manage all of the above (salary, benefits, etc.)
See "minimum-wage drive jockey".
And that presumes they use HDDs and make a new copy once a year (keeping a few years as redundant backups and "working" masters)... Although I normally consider tape drives a waste of time and money, in this situation, they seem even more ideal than HDDs. The "handful of PCs" cost goes up, but the cost-per-copy drops drastically.
Even if you replace "minumum-wage drive jockey" with "qualified IT professional or three", I can't see how you'd get anywhere near $12k per year.
Even if it did cost a quarter million a year that's still a fraction of the salary the so called "talent" makes for the big movies, there is plenty of money in the movie industry to pay for a datacenter for long term storage of the film.
Maybe the movie industry should hire some people from Google to help them design a large scale redundant storage facility, Google seems to have the entire web cached, adding movies - even at a few TB each - shouldn't be a problem for them.