I had a lot of work to do lately and I messed up with 650Gb of PT sessions.
I Have to back it all up... I am a little scared of diong it on DVDs (that's
164 DVD!!!).
What would you suggest? Hard drive? That would be the easiest way: 3x250Gb
HD...

HD or DVD that's a lot of money anyway.

Thanks for your suggestions..
Max


- Don't yell, use your talkback -

Good God that's a lot of data for audio. You might want to consider
investing in a tape drive. They make firewire AIT-2 drives for about
$1,000. The only thing is the tapes are about $50 for the 50/100GB
kind. Usually you have to use the 50GB level because audio doesn't
really compress down that much (as it's basically "random" data as far
the computer is concerned).

Per GB, DVDs will always be cheaper. It's just a question of how much
your *time* is worth. A tape drive can just run overnight. The other
bonus is that tapes are probably a whole lot more stable than DVDs. So
you have to ask yourself how often you see yourself creating this much
data and how stable and portable you want the backups to be?

AIT-1 was a standard for professional audio backup for awhile (at least
in NYC), but that's changed now....

Cheers,
Trevor de Clercq


Maxy888 wrote:
I had a lot of work to do lately and I messed up with 650Gb of PT sessions.
I Have to back it all up... I am a little scared of diong it on DVDs (that's
164 DVD!!!).
What would you suggest? Hard drive? That would be the easiest way: 3x250Gb
HD...

HD or DVD that's a lot of money anyway.

Thanks for your suggestions..
Max


- Don't yell, use your talkback -

Trevor de Clercq wrote:

Good God that's a lot of data for audio. You might want to consider
investing in a tape drive. They make firewire AIT-2 drives for about
$1,000. The only thing is the tapes are about $50 for the 50/100GB
kind. Usually you have to use the 50GB level because audio doesn't
really compress down that much (as it's basically "random" data as far
the computer is concerned).

In that price range, you can also consider a VXAtape drive. VXA-2
is supposed to do 80 GB native uncompressed. newegg.com has an
internal LVD SCSI drive for $890, and you can get an Adaptec 29160
LVD SCSI controller for $140, so together you're very close to $1000.
External Firewire versions are more like almost $1500.

You're still looking at 8 or 9 tapes, though, to back up all 650 GB!
And tapes are not free, of course.

If you want bigger capacity, you can toss about $3500 at somebody
and get an LTO2 drive (200 GB native capacity) or $5500 for an LTO3
drive (400 GB native capacity).

Which drive is right for you depends on whether you want to back up
the whole system on as few tapes as possible or whether you want to
put one project on each tape.

- Logan

Maxy888 wrote:

I had a lot of work to do lately and I messed up with 650Gb of PT sessions.
I Have to back it all up... I am a little scared of diong it on DVDs (that's
164 DVD!!!).
What would you suggest? Hard drive? That would be the easiest way: 3x250Gb
HD...

HD or DVD that's a lot of money anyway.

Thanks for your suggestions..



What's it on now? Could you get another one of those?

My files are on 2 computers: 1 PC and 1 Mac... I have a total of 8 HD...

I may be wrong but here in Italy 1 DVD-R is about 1,50$ for 4,4GB that is
more or less 40cents/GB

For HD I can say that for 160GB the cost is more or less 60cents/GB but it
is much more easy to do backup...

Can you tell me how long will a tape drive (VXA) take to make a 80GB backup?


"S O'Neill" ha scritto nel messaggio
news
Maxy888 wrote:

I had a lot of work to do lately and I messed up with 650Gb of PT
sessions.
I Have to back it all up... I am a little scared of diong it on DVDs
(that's 164 DVD!!!).
What would you suggest? Hard drive? That would be the easiest way:
3x250Gb HD...

HD or DVD that's a lot of money anyway.

Thanks for your suggestions..



What's it on now? Could you get another one of those?

IMHO, you can't beat a hard drive in one of those plastic plug-in
drawers (~$15 at my local dealer). HD storage is getting cheaper
every year and you can't beat the convienence with any kind of
optical discs or tape.

"Richard Crowley" wrote in message


IMHO, you can't beat a hard drive in one of those plastic plug-in
drawers (~$15 at my local dealer). HD storage is getting cheaper
every year and you can't beat the convienence with any kind of
optical discs or tape.

Trouble is, hard drives go bad on the shelf.

Trouble is, too, that if you drop a hard drive, it's usually toast. If
you drop a tape, you're fine.

I remember at Sony an admin person came in once and accidentally knocked
a stack of UMatic CD master tapes. The mastering engineer was like "Oh,
no! Now all those masters are going to have dropouts!" Of course, he
was joking. Tape is nice and stable when getting knocked around.

Cheers,
Trevor de Clercq

Richard Crowley wrote:
IMHO, you can't beat a hard drive in one of those plastic plug-in
drawers (~$15 at my local dealer). HD storage is getting cheaper
every year and you can't beat the convienence with any kind of
optical discs or tape.

Maxy888 wrote:
Can you tell me how long will a tape drive (VXA) take to make a 80GB backup?

It's supposed to be able to stream at 6 MB/s. So about 4 hours if
you really get that speed. Getting that speed depends on being
able to produce the backup data that quickly, which can be hard if
you have a lot of small files. Chances are with audio data, you
have a small number of really large files, so you should be able
to stream pretty quickly.

- Logan

Maxy888 wrote:

What would you suggest? Hard drive? That would be the easiest way: 3x250Gb
HD...

Removable hard drives are fine if you can charge the cost back to the client,
because otherwise you will end up with 750 GB of single purpose storage and a
media bill to match.
PapaNate

In article writes:

Trouble is, hard drives go bad on the shelf.

They do? Well, so do cars, too, I guess. This was more of a problem in
the old MFM drive days where, when the disk was stopped properly, the
heads contaced the surface, but in a "parking" area where there was no
data recorded. Eventually, they'd stick and sometimes it took whacking
the drive on its side to get the head unstuck. There was a ROM
upgrade that I think Seagate came up with that detected when the heads
were stuck and drove extra current into the motor to try to unstick
them. Now that the heads park themselves off the disk, probably the
only thing you'd have to worry about is lubricant drying up. And if
dirt and dust can't get in, probably whatever keeps the lubricant
lubricant can't get out.

Just for giggles, not too long ago I popped the old Seagate IDE drive
out of the computer that I bought in 1997 into a removable carrier,
put it in that PC (which I'm still using, but with a new disk drive)
and it fired right up. Maybe I was lucky, or I just didn't wait long
enough.



--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

On Feb 18, 2005, Nathan West commented:

Removable hard drives are fine if you can charge the cost back to the client,
because otherwise you will end up with 750 GB of single purpose storage and a
media bill to match.
--------------------------------snip----------------------------------

Drive costs are trivial nowadays, except when you're getting into terabytes
of data.

250-gig drives can be had for well under $200 these days. I think $600 for
this kind of backup isn't that much, all things considered. Heck I think
that's cheaper than an equivalent number of backup storage tapes.

And note that the backup storage tapes have proven to not always be very
reliable, particularly the 200-gig DTF's. I speak from sad experience on
this one, based on what I've seen in the visual effects business, where data
files can get humongous beyond belief.

--MFW