Low(ish) risk, affordable storage/backup solutions?

One opinion:

You might consider populating the second optical drive slot of your MacPro with a Blu-Ray burner. I use Blu-Ray data discs as back up and it has worked out very well. You can burn around 46 or so gigs to a single Blu-Ray DL disc. Storage is convenient, and if you use a Disk Catalog software like DiskCatalogMaker, you can search for files with the disc off-line.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/blu-ray

MtD

For MD:

Very interested in your Blu-Ray storage idea. Any recommendations for a BR burner? Is the Pioneer worth the extra cost? I would like to burn movies as well as use for storage? Anything extra needed for the internal burner?

You should probably check with OWC directly. The burner I have is a Matshita (purchased from OWC), which has worked reliably for 3+years, but it is a very slow burner as compared to what you can get today.

MtD

The Blu-ray option is an alright one, but keep in mind that for those 50GB discs, you're still talking about $8-10 PER disc. You make 10 discs, and it's already gonna be cheaper to have bought a HDD. Your MacPro technically has space for 6 drives (4 HDD slots plus the two optical bays could be repurposed for hard drives as well). My Mac Pro has 5 HDD and a Blu-ray burner which I do use to burn movies to. Two of my drives (2TB each) are RAID 0 for speed, then those two are RAID 1 to the other two (also 2TB), so I always have two complete copies of all my data. The 5th drive is the original one that came with my Pro which I moved into the second optical bay spot and am using as my boot drive. For the cost, adding a couple more hard drives are infinitely cheaper than burning to Blu-rays the whole time. That's not to say that the Blu-ray option wouldn't be a good one for archiving a lot of data that you don't need immediate access to.

Hope that helps.

I use this: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/usb/raid_1/Gmax

-DH

There are four levels of back up.

1. On line

2. Near off line

3. Remote off line

4. Archival

On line is a RAID 1 type arraingement ( or simply using Carbon Copy Cloner to dupe to a second connected drive).

Near on line is copying a drive to a removable media (Hard Drive, Blu-Ray, Digital Tape, etc) and storing it on site.

Remote off line can be simply creating a duplicate set of your near on line material and storing it off site. Or, it can be using some sort of cloud storage system

Archival is putting your material on a media (or in a storage depot) that will last 30 or more years. This is NOT a hard drive nor any garden variety optical media.

The operating principle for data storage is simple - you need at least two copies (three is better) stored in different locations.

This is my set up -

I purchased two Voyager Q docks and enough hard drives to keep two complete backup copies of everything - 1 near on line and 1 off line (stored in an offsite secure place). These backups include all current projects on the computer plus years of previous work that I do not regularly reuse. Currently each backup set is ~ 8 TB. What this gives me is three copies of current projects and two copies of finished projects.

One variation on this strategy is get something like the Promise Pegasis RAID or Caldigit HDOne and set it up as a RAID 5. This will give data integrity for the on-line and reduces the need for a set of on site storage as long as your needs can be accommodated by its storage capacity. Once you exceed it, you're back in the same position of needing a backup set on site as well as the off site stuff.

You want to be in the position of - if the computer fries the drives, you loose no more than a day's work. If the studio burns, you have a backup off site and loose no more than a week's work. If a nuclear bomb goes off, it won't matter where anything is stored as it's highly unlikely you'll be around anyway.

Cheers,

x

edit: keep in mind, none of this will protect you from corrupted files if you copy the corrupted file to your backup ...

Thank you @Stuidio X for your approach and the detail provided in this response. I've read several of your replies on this topic from 2009 forward, and was glad to see this one as it is quite helpful to current choices. Many thanks.

- Question about RAID 5 -- my fastest connection to external storage at this point is Firewire800. I'd like to get another year ouf life of my current iMac 24" (2009) with 8GB RAM and see what comes from Apple later this fall for hardware. I don't think I can alter the ports to create an eSATA option can I? Anyway, given this... Is RAID 5 via FireWire 800 suitable for editing current FCP-X 1080p projects (generated from Nikon D800 events), as well as being the on-line backup? I assume I will need to keep the RAID 5 in a "constant-on" state.

- Question about starting and adding storage: Say I start with a 4TB RAID 5. My burn rate for storage is going to fill the "75% available" capacity in about a year. Which RAID 5 systems would allow for upgrading to 8TB? Or is it just easier to add another 4TB RAID-5 box?

- What do you suggest for simple, constant backup to an HDD that is then designated as the Remote Off Line backup storage device for this scenario?

Cheers,