- Moderator
- #21
Jeff Kilgroe
Well-known member
...Read the fine print. "Unlimited" is not really unlimited. And unless you have a 5Gbps upstream connection or better, you will go old trying to archive anything close to the amount of data that many of us R3D people create. But yeah, off-site archival services are indeed an option. And even with those services, it's best to not trust them as your only archive. Shit happens, if not to you, then to someone else.
I totally agree with Evangelos as far as archiving film prints, if you have them. With most productions today involving a DI process and typically generating far more data in post than what is delivered as a final product, there is a significant amount of data to back up and even archive, film-out or not. At some point film-outs will become obsolete. In 10 years, I think studio film distribution will be completely dead... The logistics don't make sense anymore. People will keep film alive for as long as possible, it's an art form, but mainstream production will move away from it entirely, and in the near future too.
Evangelos is also correct about SSDs not being an option. The gate leakage is when the NAND cells inside FLASH memory lose their charge over time. When that happens, poof, the data becomes corrupted or even lost entirely. Manufacturers like Samsung and Siemens have been promising write-once FLASH storage for several years now, for use as long-term archival video acquisition media, etc.., but it has yet to emerge on the open market.
With magnetic storage media, there is electron creep, your magnetic tapes and discs degrade over time and we are seeing this happen more readily with newer HDDs than older ones. With newer HDD's, the magnetic bit targets on drive platters are so much smaller, that the amount of degradation each target can withstand is several times smaller than with previous generations. Same with tapes like LTO. With newer generation LTO-4 and especially LTO-5, data density is increasing while being stored on what is essentially the same media with slightly improved coatings. Optical media, in the form of writable CD/DVD/Blu-Ray, uses photo chemicals similar to film... Actually the substrates inside optical media are just a type of film. They degrade over time, even when stored properly. With film, as it degrades, the first signs are noticeable shifts in color density or even some blurring, but as a photographic image, we can still view it as the image it is intended to be. With binary data, those same degradations will eventually be enough to corrupt data beyond recovery. I have optical disks that are now close to 15 years old and as I have gone through many of them over the past few years, I have encountered of discs that have become problematic or even unreadable. Most of them still work just fine, but the degradation is obviously there, these are CDs... DVD's have nearly 8X the areal density of CDs and use the same photo chemicals on a finer-textured substrate and yet again, the same principle applies to Blu-Ray. I really wonder what the shelf life of BD-RE discs will be. When Sony and partners claim 25 years, I think that's no more than wishful thinking based on lab tests. In 25 years, I guess we'll know for sure. Optical discs make no sense for large data archival anyway. The price per GB is super-expensive compared to LTO and HDD. LTO is still the price leader, provided you archive enough data to recover the costs of the tape drive and software. HDD in combination with LTO seems to make the most sense for building a robust backup and archival strategy.
So the best we can do is store or archive whatever we have; film, data, etc.. Pick a type of media (or multiple types) that fit your budgets and workflow. Redundancy is way more important than any particular technological choice. At this point, no one has come up with any archival method to withstand eternity, so you can bet that in the coming years, you will be migrating much of that data to newer and "better" archival formats.
