Storage guru Bob Zelin does a great job reviewing the diffferent flavors of LTO for archiving your media & projects. LTO Archiving is easier and more affordable then ever. In this guide for the Creative Cow Bob gives you everything you need to know to add safe, secure, affordable LTO Archiving to your workflow.
Videoguys offers mLogic external thunderbolt LTO archiving solutions.
Creative Cow by Bob Zelin
Now that videotape and audio tape are going away, the media storage system being used by most audio and video professional is disk drives. Unfortunately, as most of us know, spinning disk drives are not very stable, and ultimately fail after a certain period of time. Once a disk drive no longer is willing to mount on our desktops, we can no longer get back the critical audio or video media that we need, usually sending us into a panic.
So most people's concern today is, "How do I safely back up my media?"
The cheapest solution is to purchase a cheap drive dock, where you can slide in inexpensive single disk drives, and back up your critical media. Move your media from one set of drives to the other every few years for maximum safety.
Another more expensive solution is to buy a redundant drive array. If you have an 8 bay or 16 bay RAID array, you buy another one, and use a cloning program (Carbon Copy Cloner, Super Duper, Chrono Sync, Shot Put Pro, etc.) to back up your media.
An even MORE expensive solution is to build what is called "near line storage," which is another entire server/disk drive system that backs up everything from your system, and can be called back to your main system. It's a little slower, which is why it's called "near" line instead of o line, but everything is available across your network when you need to recall it.
No matter what solution you choose, these choices are all based on DRIVES, and drives ultimately fail. It's not a matter of "if" – it's a matter of when. Sometimes drives can last for 5 – 6 years, other times, they will fail within the year. That does not give you a lot of confidence in the long term.
When they were first being introduced, Blu-ray disks sounded promising. With the huge amount of data storage that video professionals use, this proven to not be practical – and those too will fail eventually.
And of course, there is always "The Cloud" (Dropbox, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, etc.). But for those of us dealing with terabytes of storage, this is not very practical, due to the very limited speed of the internet today. read more...
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