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.

Comments

Plan for backup before you buy

[Ktistec Machine]

Whenever you buy storage, you should buy the necessary backup capacity at the same time. You should never buy storage without buying backup capacity. Budget for it right from the start. If you can't afford the backup, you can't afford the storage. This may mean getting half as much storage as you'd like, but that's just the way it has to be. You probably wouldn't buy a car without an engine. It wouldn't do its job. So don't buy storage without backup. If you do, you have a storage system that can't do its job.

Hilarious

[jeffmeden]

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.

Lets start from the top: You *can* plug in an external drive, it's called a complete hardware duplicate of your array (or perhaps for space/cost consideration, a single disk based copy held offline and synced regularly). Not hard and not terribly expensive (i would go with this solution personally). Cloud? Yep the bandwidth and storage even on something like Amazon Glacier would be prohibitive to all but the most financially independent geeks. Bluray doesnt hold enough (even at 50gb/disc you need 400 of them, groan). So, tapes? You bet your ass tapes are designed to do exactly this task, why do you think they are still in use? You can get individual tapes at 1/1.5TB, but for a one man operation they are probably going to cost you more than the first solution (offline spinning disks) and they are a pain to manage properly.

Now what is this doing on ask slashdot? A pencil, some scratch paper, and 15 minutes between amazon.com and newegg.com would tell you the prices of every solution. Oh, right, they need a chance to tee up some targeted ads for Carbonite, Mozy, Crashplan, etc.

Re:reduce the amount

[cdrudge]

I wasn't looking for it to go anywhere really other than pointing out the absurdity of saying that taking a bluray rip down to a 800MB divx rip results in just an acceptable loss of quality.

I'm by no means a audio/videophile snob, but you either have a blind and/or deaf if you can't see a MAJOR quality deficiency with a 800 bluray rip. What's the point of having a bluray movie if the first thing you normally do is make it look like crap?