Optical Storage Comparison

[Biscuit]

TBH if you back up to hard disk then put them in airtight bags and secure them in like a cheap locksafe i would say its just as, if not more than reliable as god knows how many DVDs/Blu Ray. Im still using a hard drive from 5-6 years ago and its perfectly fine and i haven't had that in any sealed protection its been in and out of draws and PCs and put in enclosures... all sorts.

[jim]

What on earth are you backing up that requires you to consider 3TBs worth of DVDs or alternatives.

This is a legitimate question I'm not an industrial spy or anything...I just got the impression this was a "at home" situation

Generally speaking, high-bitrate media.

There are other bits and pieces, but proportionally they don't count for much.

[jim]

TBH if you back up to hard disk then put them in airtight bags and secure them in like a cheap locksafe i would say its just as, if not more than reliable as god knows how many DVDs/Blu Ray. Im still using a hard drive from 5-6 years ago and its perfectly fine and i haven't had that in any sealed protection its been in and out of draws and PCs and put in enclosures... all sorts.

Probably true, although I had a file on one of my backups a couple of years back that just refused to copy, and was partly corrupted. I know it's always a possibility with any kind of media, but it made me a bit jumpy

[mikerr]

Well blurays have just jumped to 100GB making it a more reasonable 30 disks for 3TB, but the pricing will take a while to come down.

Tapes:
4x Ultrium LTO 800GB tapes @ £32 = £128 - 5p/GB

Ignoring the MASSIVE COST (£1400) of the tape drive of course !

[Terbinator]

I'm loving my Blu-Ray burner at the minute, TBH i don't find the 25GB discs to bad price wise, roughly £1 a disc - its the 50GB that are the killers, the best part of being able to write too BD costs to much

[jim]

I was horrified when I found out how much tape drives cost.

I thought it sounded like a good option for all of 8 seconds or so.

[Sputnik]

You forgot to say how many USB sticks it would use

[scaryjim]

192 16GB usb sticks @ £18.78 each = £3605.76 (£1.17/GB)

[jim]

Haha, I'll put that in next time

[scaryjim]

Personally I think I'd rather burn 650 DVDs than wait for 192 USB2 memory sticks to fill, though

[ik9000]

Aren't optical discs only good for 10 years? The IT guys at work keep banging on about this. Worrying really given a good number of my CDs are pushing 15 years old now.

[peterb]

2 LTO4 tape cartridges (1.6TB/cartidge compressed) £46.00 (approx) at 800Gb (uncompressed the most you would need is 5 at about £100.

(The downside is the Approx £1400 for the tape drive and the SCSI card to go with it or you could go for a SAS interface which works out a little cheaper http://www.google.co.uk/products/cat...d=0CCwQ8wIwBA#)

Tape is by far the cheapest and most reliable backup/archive medium.

[jim]

As you say though, if we're only using about 5 tapes, the drive becomes a huge expense proportionally.

In comparison, I could buy a blu-ray writer, double the number of blu-ray disks I need, duplicate everything again, and still have enough money for a few ice-creams.

[mikerr]

Well no one is seriously going to backup onto 300 DVDs
so the only real options for backup at this level is HDDs or Tapes.

[Terbinator]

Just wait for those 3TB drives round Q4 ?

[peterb]

As you say though, if we're only using about 5 tapes, the drive becomes a huge expense proportionally.

In comparison, I could buy a blu-ray writer, double the number of blu-ray disks I need, duplicate everything again, and still have enough money for a few ice-creams.

Yes, but then compare the time taken stuffing those DVDs into the writer, labelling them, storing them etc etc. You could go for LTO2 - cheaper tapes, drives about half the price, but then using around 10 to 15 tapes.

And if you are planning to keep off site backups as well then LTO4 starts making more sense - but it depends on how valuable/replacebale the data is, and the level of convenience in both storing and retrieving it.

Just wait for those 3TB drives round Q4 ?

But the whole point of backing up is because hard drives are elctro mechanical devices - prone to failure - so why back up from one (relatively) unreliable and fragile (don't drop it) device to another?