RAID VS External HD's

[surjer]

I am currently looking for an Archive solution. So far we have been backing everything up on DVD's. Burn one and keep it here and then burn another copy and ship it off site to a storage facility. We are now getting a little concerned about how long these disks will last. I thought it would be a good idea to start storing the data on hard drives and I was curious what the best solution would be.

To give you an idea of the amount of data we are up to 160DVD's over the past 2 years. (Roughly 1/2 a TB per year)

I was curious if it would be better to

A.) Purchase a TB Raid Server Station - http://www.microcenter.com/byos/byos_single_product_results.phtml?product_id=234537

B.) Build a Server Station and Raid Drives in the Server. (I like this idea the best as we can expand if we use a rackmount server)

C.) Buy External Hard Drives and just create 2 copies of them. (Probably the Cheapest Option here I guess)

With the Raid's would we be able to just take one of the drives out and pack it away in storage and add a new formatted drive and it will rebuild the data?

Any suggestions would be appreciated...

 

[Jeepson33s]

might want to consider tape storage......i get very uneasy about storing things on media that has moving parts that can break and wear down over time.

 

[surjer]

our main servers are back'd up on tapes but its an act of GOD to get them restored. We need quick access to archived data.. This is just for our small group of the large company...

 

[uOpt]

Harddrives can be brittle, too. Recently Maxtor has been accused of (again) producing drives that work fine when you put them on the shelf and pull them off a year later they are toast.

Another disadvantage of just one live backup is that if you fatfinger a piece of data and don't notice it before it gets copied to the backup then you don't have a valid copy anymore. That can also happen as a result of system errors, silently corrupting a file or two.

As mentioned, you need to consider tapes.

Although tapes look fragile and people are afraid of magnets they do have a longer shelf life than CD/DVD solutions - if you store them correctly(!).

You can only solve the problem by paying a service to store your backup media and re-copy it at fixed intervals.

 

[surjer]

Its not the tapes being fragile that we are concerned with at all. Everything is already backed up on tapes through the main backup system.

We have about 20 servers storing data which all get backed up on tapes nightly.

My group has a small portion of 1 of the servers space. (About 60GB's shared space ) We have to clean it off frequently but for the most part it will house our current projects nicely.

We have been creating our own backups on DVD's just so we can get to them faster than having to nag TS for em. If you nag TS you have to fill out a form and tell them exactly which day you need and what folder you want and bla bla bla.

So LONG term the data is backed up rigouresly. Its our small group that wants a Fast Access Archiving system. Something our 20 users can get to really easy and restore within a few minutes.

I suppose it would be cool to have a PC with the raid in it and a Tape Backup unit on it. So short term it would be on the raid and long term it would be on the tapes...