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.
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.
At home, I didn't feel like paying for 2 large arrays to store my data, so if I rip any media, I always rip it to DIVX. 800 MB for a DVD or even bluray rip is a great economy, saves me money on primary storage and also enables me to back it up. I accept the loss of quality as I can always reference the original media if I want.
Another option in the future may be subscription services which have HD content, thus eliminating my need to roll my own. We'll see what happens there.
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.
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.
> It's not like you could just plug in an external drive [...]
Why not? Maybe not one, but 10 or 20 of them.
"My friend (read I) lost 20TB of pirated content! What should my friend have done different?"
How about, ask yourself, how much of that content were you intending to ever consume again. Yeah, you can most likely delete 95% of it, that's 1TB of content that you might use again.
Hoarders! *lol*
A quick check at one service which lists such large amounts, you would be looking at almost $20k/year to keep a single offsite copy of that. That is the posted price however, I imagine that is enough that you could shop around and find a deal, but, a deal is still going to be prohibitive for most people.
At 20 TB I would start thinking about one of two things: Tape, and/or git-annex.
Unless prices have changed since I last looked and the scales tipped, tape has the advantage of being cheap. Of course, you will need to test your tapes occasionally and likely want 2 copies just in case, but, at that point you are invested in tape, may as well.
The other possibility is git-annex and lots of drives, but you can mix types. That way you can keep a catalog of your library and information on where it all is, and how many copies of each thing you have.
Of course, any way you slice it, each physical piece of media is something that can fail so you have to occasionally test to ensure redundancy.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
He could have always bought a sufficiently large tape-library from ebay - but I guess the data wasn't worth that much.
That's always the first pair of questions to ask: how much is it worth and how much would it cost to recreate?
If the answer is somewhere between "I don't know" and "Well, it's not that much", then he just should stop hoarding that much stuff.
He could have built a filer with ZFS and sent daily snapshots to a 2nd filer - but that wouldn't have helped him if the house burnt down...
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
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.
You could always just call up the NSA and ask them to restore the data. Odds are good they have a copy of it...
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.
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...
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.
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.
I use Glacier and its great. 20 TB is about $200 a month which to me does not seem like all that much money for backing up that much data. The biggest problem from a home users perspective is getting all of that data to Amazon. Hopefully he lives somewhere where fiber is available to his house.
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. ;)
Glacier at $20 per month for 20TB is rediculously cheap by today's standards. And at those sizes, you'd want to ship those drives to Amazon instead of uploading. We do this all the time and it's not that hard.
The price of TBs of storage of course will come down without question. But by today's standards $20/month for a medium that won't "bit rot" on you is an amazing deal.
You missed a 0, he has 20,000GB and the cost for glacier is $.01/gb/mo (not including upload charges). So, Glacier would cost him $200 a month or $2400 a year. Not hugely expensive but if you are OK with a quasi-local copy (offline and stored in a fire safe, perhaps) you could do it cheaper for less, after you hit the 1 year mark.
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.
To /.ers saying that 1TB+ tapes would be a good idea to do this backup, please:
Add some references and price of such hardware and media that would suit best home usage.
You're dating yourself. LTO-5 is 1.5TB native, 3TB compressed at $25 per tape. LTO-6 is 2.5TB native and 6.25TB compressed. Both of those compressed numbers are using the built-in compression in the drive.
A 10-pack of LTO-5 tapes is about $250.
You can easily encrypt the tapes and tape them offsite. You can keep a copy onsite and offsite. You're simply not doing that with disk.
Your speed is also off - an LTO-5 can write at 280MB/sec. The limiting factor is not the write time on the media but the read time from disk.
Restore times are typically limited by the write rate on the destination raidset, not the read rate from tape.
LTO-6 can hold 2.5TB per tape, a tape cost ~$70, the drives cost $2000. That's still more expensive then just more HDDs for 20TB, but at >50TB it might be worth it.
Now this joke has really come full circle.
I'm backing up my 40TB music library on Jacquard loom punch cards.
Added bonus: You can use the punched cards to make fabric. ...as a sweater!
Right now I'm wearing Justin Bieber's "Love Me"
https://web.duke.edu/isis/gess...