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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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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?