What do people use to archive video?

[Rob Lohman]

Thank you for telling me this. It is the first time I've heard of that.
From now on I will advice to anybody who wants to listen to stay
away from those Iomega harddisks. It's just absurd. Especially
since almost everybody is using Windows 2000 / XP now-a-days
(in the PC world), especially with video and photo stuff for which
these drives are mostly used. And guess what kind of file system
we would like for that. Indeed, NTFS. Much better if you want
your data to survive a power loss for example.

Thanks for clarifying it John!

[John Britt]

Rob

Without getting too meta here, for the sake of fairness I do want to add that I've owned the Iomega 80GB USB2.0 HDD for just over one year and that I have had (knock on wood) no problems so far. I have it formatted to NTFS and I've even used it successfully as a capture drive. So far I've been happy with it.

If I boycotted every company that acted absurdly, I'd have to return everything from my Iomega hard drive to my Sony DVD burner (don't even get me started on Sony customer service) to everything I've ever bought at Best Buy! :D

[Rob Lohman]

I can understand your point of view, John. I'm not saying their
product is bad (some of you might even know me from working
with Iomega on another product) or that it doesn't do NTFS.
But how can I recommend a product for such a serious business
as video work if they won't support it if we put NTFS on it? I just
can't.

There are a lot more excellent external harddisk products out
there that don't have any problems with you using NTFS. If
someone asks me for a recommendation I can assure you I
will not recommend the Iomega anymore due to this. That's all
I'm saying.

[Matthew de Jongh]

well i do both, i have a raid5 of (4) wd sata 250 gig drives using the adaptec 2410 raid card (4 channel max) so i have a usable amount of like 700gig

then you get a single ide drive and put it in a usb 2.0 enclosure, you copy the entire project (raw files, project file and finished file etc) to the external (both as occasional backup during the project and then for final archival) then take the drive out of the ext. enclosure and put it in a box on a shelf labeled.

i JUST got a 40 gig ipod for a valentines day/bday present and i'm gonna play around with using that to move projects from home to work, it will be nice to play with files at work and be able to take them home easily.

i need to look into the options for going from the 4 channel adaptec sata raid card to the 8 channel card, i'm not out of space but i'm kind of wondering what happens if you need to grow it, if you have to start all over again?!?

matthew

[Rob Lohman]

I think most people who are going beyond 4 discs will move to
an external enclosure of some sort. I linked to a Promise one.
Don't know if Adaptec has those. Ofcourse it's no problem getting
such a system from the big boys for big cash though.

Raid 5 is another option indeed which will give you more space,
but less security with the more drives you use.

[Matthew de Jongh]

yeah adaptec has an enclosure device.

i have had mixed luck with promise in the past and i just can't trust them for anything really important.

your mileage may vary.

other than raid 5 what would you use? raid 10??

mirroring is a bit too wasteful and stripping drives has failed me in the past.

my preference is a raid5 with a hot spare.

if i had a card with more than 4 ports i would definitely add a hot spare.

i'm using another drive off of the raid to do occasionally backups of the project to.

matthew

[Rob Lohman]

Mirroring with striping. But only if you want and can afford it.
Raid 5 definitely is a very good choice, security with only one
drive "lost". But it is less secure than mirroring. Raid 0 is just
striping, Raid 1 is just mirroring, Raid 10 is mirroring + striping
(need 4 harddisks for that) and Raid 5 is striping + parity (minimum
of 3 harddisks)

[Glenn Chan]

Also personally I would not want to store projects on a drive on a shelf. Why? Because if you pull the drive from storage 5
years later the drive might not want to function anymore (due
to a number of possible reasons). It's way better to keep the
drive online (so you can spot potential problems), especially
in a mirrored position or use a non moving non mechincal backup
solution like DVD.

If you keep the drive online you'll need a UPS (or surge protector) [which I suppose you should have anyways], keep your computer virus free, and the drives will break down faster.

DVDs don't last forever. You need to store them well, and even then they'll degrade.

DV tape doesn't last forever. But based on a similar computer backup tape, it should last at least 15 years.

A hard drive you store on your shelf would be nice if it doesn't break down. Do they break down when you don't use them?

[Matthew de Jongh]

i guess i just assume everyone here knows to run a GOOD ups on their editing system?

the people i know who have mysterious computer problems are almost always running with no ups protection.

and no a $20 power strip with a surge protector from best buy doesn't count.

i own a fairly good sized isp and EVERYTHING runs on APC ups's

i have a few that came on pallets they are so big. i have one that is a raid of batteries where if one module fails it keeps running and notifies you. the modules weight something like 400+ pounds.

there is a new cd-rom laser format coming out, i forget the name but it will hold a ton more on a disc than the current stuff

matthew

[Donie Kelly]

Hi Matthew

I didn't realise this was going to get into a "mine is bigger than your" type thread but I get your point ;)

I also know people who have mysterious computer problems but it's usually not the hardware or the software ;)

Donie

[Rob Lohman]

Blueray. I think you can already buy it from Sony? Probably not
as a datastorage system, though.

[Matthew de Jongh]

yeah i think that is it, its like $3k but with the size of hard drives and the size of files that people manipulate these days it will probably become mainstream faster than you would think.

matthew

[Rob Lohman]

There's a link to a Promise controller with 4 channels that supports
8 harddisks. See the thread here.

There are also two more RAID threads going on:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=21152
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=20783

[Robert Knecht Schmidt]

"DVDs don't last forever. You need to store them well, and even then they'll degrade."

No, but in 15 years DVDs will be an obsolete storage format anyway.

15 years ago the computer archive storage format of preference was 5.25" floppy disks that held 360 kB, or 0.0000748 DVDs.

If you haven't transferred your 5.25" floppy archives to some different medium by now, it's probably because the data isn't worth archiving.

When we speak of "archiving" in computer terms, we're talking 5-10 years. Anything greater than ten years is an epoch.

The only people who archive UNIVAC reels onto present-day media are computer historians.