Nick Pasquariello
Well-known member
I have a colleague that needs to start archiving projects and footage by the end of this year. If she were larger, I'd say, 100%, LTO, through a Cache-A Unit. That's about a $10k starup cost, and then $60-80 per tape, two tapes per 1.3 TB of info, and store one tape on-site, and one off-site somewhere (either via a service or a relative's house).
But she does mainly graphics work, and not shooting. In 6 years she's amassed 11TB of data. Even though that's an upward trend, I don't see her doing more than 3-5 TB a year. She also rarely pulls from stuff that's multiple years old.
So, the cost of archival, at that rate, if you estimate the life of the Cache-A unit to be, say, 5 years (just speculating, based o standard reliability lives of computers as well as the growth rate of LTO), she'd looking at a cost of around $2.3k per year to archive 2, maybe 3 tapes worth of data.
Of course, a simpler LTO drive might do, but for some reason, I always have trouble finding a drive, with cost, listed anywhere. Downside: would still have to figure out where to hold tapes off-site.
I've also looked into Amazon Glacier. It seems like a good fit, but not a great fit. Their storage cost is cheap, and reliable. However, you get charged PER ITEM to withdraw data. And also for the size of the item. You sort of get credited an allotment of data that you can pull back each moth without incurring a charge . . . it's all needlessly complicated. But you can't request to unarchive, say, a folder with all it's contents. It seems that the best course of action would be to zip up every project you archive, and then withdraw that zip folder if you need any item back. Course, if you need just the project file, you're pulling back a ton of data (and downloading a ton of data, and unzipping a ton of data) that you don't need. So perhaps uploading two zips per project, one of everything, and one with just the project files, would work?
Third option I can think of: Solid State Drives. It's just about economical to purchase SSDs, load them up, and there's your archive. I'm not sure what the life is on SSDs, but it's better than traditional HDs, right? No moving parts. The benefit here is that it gets cheaper over time. Might cost $2k this year to get rid of 1-2 TB, but it'll cost half that next year, and half that the year after.
Still have the problem of figuring out where to store them offsite.
So, for any small shops out there: how are you archiving? Surely you can't store everything in an accessible manner all the time. I know how to handle this for a large shop (managed almost half a Petabyte for Hasbro's internal studio before I resigned 2 months ago), but when it comes down to anything in the midrange, a few Terrabytes, nothing seems both safe and economical. Thoughts?
But she does mainly graphics work, and not shooting. In 6 years she's amassed 11TB of data. Even though that's an upward trend, I don't see her doing more than 3-5 TB a year. She also rarely pulls from stuff that's multiple years old.
So, the cost of archival, at that rate, if you estimate the life of the Cache-A unit to be, say, 5 years (just speculating, based o standard reliability lives of computers as well as the growth rate of LTO), she'd looking at a cost of around $2.3k per year to archive 2, maybe 3 tapes worth of data.
Of course, a simpler LTO drive might do, but for some reason, I always have trouble finding a drive, with cost, listed anywhere. Downside: would still have to figure out where to hold tapes off-site.
I've also looked into Amazon Glacier. It seems like a good fit, but not a great fit. Their storage cost is cheap, and reliable. However, you get charged PER ITEM to withdraw data. And also for the size of the item. You sort of get credited an allotment of data that you can pull back each moth without incurring a charge . . . it's all needlessly complicated. But you can't request to unarchive, say, a folder with all it's contents. It seems that the best course of action would be to zip up every project you archive, and then withdraw that zip folder if you need any item back. Course, if you need just the project file, you're pulling back a ton of data (and downloading a ton of data, and unzipping a ton of data) that you don't need. So perhaps uploading two zips per project, one of everything, and one with just the project files, would work?
Third option I can think of: Solid State Drives. It's just about economical to purchase SSDs, load them up, and there's your archive. I'm not sure what the life is on SSDs, but it's better than traditional HDs, right? No moving parts. The benefit here is that it gets cheaper over time. Might cost $2k this year to get rid of 1-2 TB, but it'll cost half that next year, and half that the year after.
Still have the problem of figuring out where to store them offsite.
So, for any small shops out there: how are you archiving? Surely you can't store everything in an accessible manner all the time. I know how to handle this for a large shop (managed almost half a Petabyte for Hasbro's internal studio before I resigned 2 months ago), but when it comes down to anything in the midrange, a few Terrabytes, nothing seems both safe and economical. Thoughts?
