I've been shooting and editing video in HD for over two years now. I have run into a bit of a problem with storage.

I have 24 1TB external usb2/firewire drives. all full. I have need of ALL the footage that is taking up these drives. Because of how my expansion happened, backups are spread out across all the drives, wherever I had room at the time.

Its a tangled muddled mess, and that's before we even talk about the wires...

I have a plan and was wondering if I could get some Critiques from others who have dealt with massage storage needs.

My plan is to buy two more hard drives, 1TB each, and sort through all my drives, and separate them by client. Once I have a hard drive for a client, I will zip in all with winrar, and have winrar break it down into 50gb chunks so I can burn it to blu-ray. When I'm done, I will disconnect the hard drive, put it on a shelf, and send the discs off to a safe in another building.

When I need the files, I can connect the hard drive, and edit from there, saving any changed files on a DVD or Blu-ray disc.

Is this a reasonable plan? Is there a cheaper way to do this?

Sorting by client and project is necessary regardless. It may be cheaper to buy double as many external drives than to burn that many BluRay discs, and take WAY less time. We use 1TB drives for backup, and keep one set onsite in case we need the files and another set offsite in case of disaster. At $100 a TB, hard drives are cheap. How much do blank BR discs cost at this point?

It'd cost $400 to backup a 1TB drive on blu-ray. 20 dollars, per 50GB

I found an interesting solution on another sub-forum

LTO tape drives, 800gb/1600gb compressed, tapes are $50 and guaranteed for thirty years, unlike hard drives which have more complex mechanics, and can fail comparatively easily. Sure, it's 1-2k for a drive that can read them, but in the long run that's a lot of money saved.

It cut my overall costs of the backup from 10k+ to under 7k, possibly as little as 5k.

My new plan is to move files to the tapes, and to a single hard drive per client. the hard drives will be offline on-site, and the tapes will be off site.

The problem and main reason why LTO is not as widely used is because the drives(not tapes) have a high failure rate. Also, in 5-6 yrs, those drives won't be able to read your tapes because the LTO industry mandates backward compatibility of only 2 generations. For example, lets say the current generation is 1.3 and a new generation comes out every 2yrs. So, in 6yrs, it will be 1.6 and they can only read tapes from 1.4 forward.

This is a simplistic explanation but there is a good thread somewhere here about LTO and its pros and cons.

Back to Blu ray: single layer discs are much more affordable($3 each).

Also, a good backup program should be used. I have read about EMS and use Acronis Workstation.