Long term storage options

[alcina]

I've never really worried about this before, just added another hard drive or just kept the original footage on my dv tapes. But I'm kinda being overrun with stuff in my office

How do you keep your original footage archived? DVDs don't seem to hold much and I've got 139GBs from 12 days of shooting so HDs get used up pretty fast!

I'm just wanting to save the avi files, really. Somehow it seems just keeping the original tape takes up less space!

 

[HiDefPics]

We archive everything to removable firewire drives. These days it seems the least expensive option for storage. You can get a 1 Terabyte drive for under $400. Some, like the Iomega UltraMax (what I'm using right now) offer RAID protection. That way you can effectively have two copies of all your data in case of a drive failure.

 

[H2O Photo Pros]

Quality hard drives are the key. A nice RAID system with swappable drives like the G-Technology G-Speed ES.

 

[Mr.X]

Lacie was having a price reduction on some of their drives. I think Newegg, Amazon had price reductions. I've had success with them for well over 5-6 years. That being said a lot of folks do not like them when used in harsher environments.

X

 

[fdog]

I have all my original negs
I have all my original chromes
I have all my original DV's

I use off-site, on-line backup for all my RAW and jpg... in addition to a local RAID 1 appliance.


Guess what I'm most paranoid about? You guessed it - the "pure electrons" images.


All the best, James

 

[Darnold9999]

Be very very afraid of external HD storage. If you go this route for anything but a backup copy RAID is the only way to go. 6 months ago I had one 500G drive die. Not a cheap brand, the drive just died for no apparant reason. Fortunately it was the backup so no harm done.

IMHO you must keep all data live - there is no such thing as long term electronic storage.

Somewhere in my junk pile I have 8" floppy's, 5" floppy's, all sorts of various flavours of hard drives and several formats of tapes. None of the foregoing can be read by any modern machine. At one point I even had some software on punch cards lying around but I did finally throw that away during a move. I can still read most of this data with my junk bin of hardware, but the reality is that if you don't move it from the last generation media to whatever you are using today - consider it lost. The work involved in bringing up old hardware and software and converting years later just is not worth it.

Currently I am using an external terabyte drive - not RAID - for live backup. But I go through these like candy so I replace the external backup drive every 6 months or so for whatever is new. My primary storage is RAID 5 on my server. Not a bad idea even for a home workstation if you value your work.

Offsite is a tape stored somewhere else. I am terrible about doing this part of backup.