Slashdot Mirror


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.

4 of 983 comments (clear)

  1. Crashplan by rossjudson · · Score: 5, Informative

    Crashplan has unlimited storage. I use their home plan; it's unlimited for up to 10 machines. I think I am backing up about 6TB there now.

  2. Hard drives + Robocopy by DogDude · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have a 16 TB media collection at home that I just back up on more hard drives.

    External hard drives in USB cases + Robocopy works great for me.

    --
    I don't respond to AC's.
  3. I agree but... by matteo.defelice · · Score: 5, Informative

    I agree, I've been using Crashplan for three years and the unlimited space it's really great BUT... ...I'm not sure about the bandwidth they provide: how long it will take to upload 20 TB? Anyway, I don't see what's the problem in using external drives for backup. Here in my lab I've realized that the best way to backup X Terabytes is to have another storage with X Terabytes...

  4. Ah, "unlimited"... right. (*cough*) by stoploss · · Score: 5, Informative

    These "unlimited" claims always turn out to be lies. When will we learn?

    My friend paid for an "unlimited" account from JustCloud for backup. He stored 1.8 TB on it and then they "fair use"'d his ass and canceled his account. They didn't even give him a refund for the rest of the money he prepaid.