No question, with tape leaving the picture, we're talking optical vs.
hard drive. And with today's high SSD prices, we can only consider
rotating hard drives. Now that Blu-ray has won out, that narrows it
down to BD-R vs. HDD.

But both have a tendency to fail suddenly and without warning, unlike
tapes - especially old analog tapes. Anyway, we're still shooting
mostly SD, so again this season we'll mostly be doing project archives
to DVD-R, and holding the project on a hard drive as long as we can
after delivery. I'd really like to get the boss to understand the
difference between *archival* HDD's and *work* HDD's. And the need to
have both.

On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Perry Mitchell

What if we forget the individual hard drives and think of archival
appliances like Drobo?
Benefits: connects to anything (USB, LAN, FW800), fairly low cost, fail-safe
with automatic defect discovery and data
recovery, fantastic data protection capabilities (equal or better than those
of RAID6, according to Drobo), i.e. protection from dual drive failure.

One of the really really neat features is the expansion capability:
replace the individual drive(s)
with larger one(s), (one at a time) it keeps
working, and once the volume is rebuilt, the larger capacity is
available immediately.

(I am not trying to sell it - in fact, we don't sell them. :))

Isn't this type of an appliance just perfect for long-term archiving?
 Redundant, large capacities, no manual intervention, i.e. no disc changing,
very easy to duplicate for off-site redundancy, fairly low cost, easy
expansion.  Neither optical media nor individual hard disks, nor even
popular redundant arrays have all of those features, and certainly not at
that cost.

Alex.

That is exactly what I am doing with my Drobo.  No more searching for  
disks or worrying about a hard drive that has been on the shelf for 6  
months mounting.  The Drobo is there and running and readily accessible.

Don
Don Stark
ScubaVision Productions
Boston, MA USA and Providenciales, Turks & Caicos Islands, BWI
Weekly Video Netcast at www.ScubaVisions.TV

On May 20, 2009, at 4:42 PM, Alex G. wrote:

I suspect Drobo protects against neither. Thus, it's not "archival"
storage at all. Just a convenient way to have a lot of online storage.

I'd agree that optical drives offer better protection from *some* elements,
vs. Drobo.  Certainly not direct sunlight or cat claws, however.  :-P.
 But burglary?
Another point: you can schedule automatic backups of Drobo volume(s) using a
single $5/mo remote backup service like Mozy.  That protects you from
everything including old soviet nukes in the hands of North Koreans, not to
mention burglary and floods.  This type of a backup works automatically, and
even continuously, with several layers of redundancy: two at the Drobo
level, one extra on the remote site.  Optical drives can't match that.

I am not sure there is a clear definition, what is "archival" storage.
 Drobo probably qualifies despite your reservations, if you use it as such.
:)

A.

I think I'm going to give that a shot, when I get some extra scratch.

Thx,

Randall Bennett
Executive Producer, TechVi
http://www.techvi.com/
(646)281-5853
AIM: randalltechvi

The problem with cloud storage is recovery time. Which is also why
it's useless for video file storage. But it would certainly qualify as
"archival" storage since it protects against both burglary and natural
disasters like a house fire.

I'll check out JungleDisk (can't wait for gDrive though) but Mozy stands out
as an enterprise-class app, e.g. by recognizing and backing up SQL databases
directly, rather than their backup images.  You're right that their business
pricing model isn't the most transparent or easy to handle.  You got me
thinking... :)
I am not sure I'd call cloud archiving "useless" for video: sure, can't
count on it to quickly retrieve 10 hours of Red One footage you shot over
the weekend and archived over two weeks - for that, gotta have one of these
babies:

http://dv411.com/gspeedxl1218tb.html (yes, this is a blatant commercial
plug)

...but you can sure count on it to store stuff indefinitely (as long as you
pay the bills), and you can always sell the house, the horse stable, send
the kids to public schools, and get 50Mbs FIOS.  Or two.

A.

P.S. Bandwidth corrupts.

I have *thought* about keeping our _working_ business files in the
cloud (as opposed to just backing them up there). But I haven't yet
turned that corner. It would make it easier when I change a form
letter - I wouldn't have to mail a copy to our other office and they
wouldn't have to find the old version and overwrite it. Soon, maybe.

We don't use a MySQL db here, and all our dbs are already in the cloud
- either at Google Docs or Zoho.