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How Do You Backup 20TB of Data?
Sean0michael writes "Recently I had a friend lose their entire electronic collection of music and movies by erasing a RAID array on their home server. He had 20TB of data on his rack at home that had survived a dozen hard drive failures over the years. But he didn't have a good way to backup that much data, so he never took one. Now he wishes he had.
Asking around among our tech-savvy friends though, no one has a good answer to the question, 'how would you backup 20TB of data?'. It's not like you could just plug in an external drive, and using any cloud service would be terribly expensive. Blu-Ray discs can hold a lot of data, but that's a lot of time (and money) spent burning discs that you likely will never need. Tape drives are another possibility, but are they right for this kind of problem? I don' t know. There might be something else out there, but I still have no feasible solution.
So I ask fellow slashdotters: for a home user, how do you backup 20TB of Data?" Even Amazon Glacier is pretty pricey for that much data.
Asking around among our tech-savvy friends though, no one has a good answer to the question, 'how would you backup 20TB of data?'. It's not like you could just plug in an external drive, and using any cloud service would be terribly expensive. Blu-Ray discs can hold a lot of data, but that's a lot of time (and money) spent burning discs that you likely will never need. Tape drives are another possibility, but are they right for this kind of problem? I don' t know. There might be something else out there, but I still have no feasible solution.
So I ask fellow slashdotters: for a home user, how do you backup 20TB of Data?" Even Amazon Glacier is pretty pricey for that much data.
I would say use floppies, but I'm kind of old and out of touch now.
Figure out the theory of everything.
Then you can always recompute your data from scratch.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I do the exact same thing with high res pictures. I immediately will take the full resolution raw image and convert it down to a 320px gif. Or maybe a 10% quality jpeg. You get great economy that way too. Who wants to keep a 30+MB image around when you can have almost the same thing in 10kB instead!
You could always just call up the NSA and ask them to restore the data. Odds are good they have a copy of it...
Connect a raspberry pi and configure it as a backup server and let it copy all to /dev/null... ...
Then put aside the money you would have invested in a "better" solution, put it in a safe bank (under your mattress)
and wait until you need to restore something..
Most probably you'll enjoy the money more
That's why it is supposed to be used with caution, as no 'rm' supports it. ;)
Just assuming that your friend had a fully legal collection, I would think that all he needs to do is ask the media companies for a new copy. Because the media industry tells us that we do not buy music, we buy licenses, right?? So even if we lose the bits-and-bytes which are easy to replace, then we still hold a license and the media companies should facilitate that your friend can exercise his licensed rights..
[/sarcasm]
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
If IBM punch cards were used, 1 GB equals approximately 47 cubic yards (assuming 80 bytes per 187x86x0.18mm per card) and about 70,000 lbs (at 2.42 g per card), so one standard railroad boxcar (limited by both cubic capacity and weight) could hold about 3 GB. 20 TB would need over 6000 boxcars of punch cards; at 60 feet per boxcar, that's a freight train about 70 miles long.
Now this joke has really come full circle.