Irregular backup strategies/techniques

[Yossarian22]

Last week or so, I sat down and though about the SOPA and the SHAMPOOA and all these other things. My mind jumped to data storage since I am under the belief that possession is 9/10ths of the law.

As it stands, hard drives are very good when I punched some numbers, something like 18GB/$

Flash and SSDs were abysmal with a value of around 1GB/$

All commercial tape mediums and solutions have steep prices or cannot compete storage wise.

CD-Rs are around 20GB/$ if you already have a burner and you buy in bulk, but what is the incentive? Archival or storage should be made simple, like with an optical jukebox. Problem is, most optical jukeboxes run in the $1000+ range. If DVD-RAM were cheaper, would make for possible awesome applications. Problem is you'd have to build said jukebox. Not that it is a particularly complex problem, just bit... annoying.

Then I was thinking back to older tape formats like DAT and MiniDV... assuming you can get a DAT recorder/player or MiniDV deck/camcorder on the cheap. Not much info on it.

I remember Commodore's Datasette which allowed for 1000 kbit per 30 min side with turbo tape programs... I know with Amiga's Video Tape Backup system (VHS) something like 500MB per 4 hours... but the ArVid back in the 90s was reported as 2GB uncompressed on an E-180 tape, but as I understand it the ArVid used inefficient method for writing.

Thoughts?

 

[Concentric]

I don't really understand what you're asking. Which means of long term storage is best? You discussed different backup media but what's that got to do with SOPA?

 

[lordsegan]

Not sure what you are asking exactly, but for any imaginable home use, spinning hard drives are always the cheapest/best/most useful solution.

You can easily get a 10TB array for several hundred dollars, even at today's prices.

 

[drescherjm]

My thoughts are to wait till the aftermath of the flood is over and purchase 2 or 3TB green hard drives to make at least 2 full backups of your data. That is assuming you have more than a few GB of data and not 10TB or more. If you have 10TB or more get an LTO3 to LTO5 unit. DVDs also can make sense in the 10s of GBs to 100s of GB but remember with this media it is highly recommended to make 2 backups. DVDs and CD-Rs degrade over time. Tape is several orders of magnitude more reliable than hard drives or optical media. Also I would not think of using RW optical media for backups.

 

[nbat58]

In my mind it depends whether you're after a home solution or an enterprise one, this will make a huge difference in your choices.

 

[Yossarian22]

Yeah, I know.

More along the lines of archival storage, but any sort of scheme that is effective and breaks 20GB/$ works, too.

Home-Enterprise solution?

LTO is way expensive. The problem with any DIY tape is that if you don't use the same device that recorded to also play back, you could encounter a plethora of problems.
Also tape solutions seems to be loaded several drives/tapes at a time, so you suffer the same syndrome as DVD or BD backup... some sort of jukebox system to organize and autoload media collections to reduce the manual overhead.

Future optical media will remedy this problem by having multiple layers per side.

Consumer hard drives are the greatest value but seem to be lacking in durability.

They make rugged hard drives (mostly for automotive applications) constructed with the same ideas as the legendary Seagate Barracuda IV (single platter, other stuff) but they have a value of around 2GB/$ or less.

It seems like you can have durability, low cost, high capacity, but you can only choose two.

SOPA is involved because... the suppression of information. However, with appropriate onsite storage and usage of lots of Alfa AWUS036H or similar wireless units... combine with Yagi-Udas properly measured, cut, and impedance matched... who needs an infrastructure?

 

[drescherjm]

LTO is way expensive.

You can get used drives for under $600 on eBay. New drives for under $1000. And after that the media is cheaper per GB than every thing out there and also several orders of magnitude more reliable. Remember on tape bit error rates are 1 in 10^17. Whats the rate on non enterprise disks? 1 in 10 ^14? However I said if you do not have 10TB+ you are better off with multiple full backups and hard drives or if you have a smaller dataset optical media makes some sense.

Future optical media will remedy this problem by having multiple layers per side.

That tends to reduce reliability. For example dual layer DVD media can be hard to read on different recorders just after burning and since it degrades over time I would never use that for backups.

It seems like you can have durability, low cost, high capacity, but you can only choose two.

I tend to agree with that.

SOPA is involved because... the suppression of information.

If what you have to backup at home is legal they generally are not that involved.