Backups

[6 Degrees]

Hi Everyone,

 

I just wanted to find out a little as to what everyone uses for storage issues or catalogues. Due to the size that most projects are they don't necessarily fit for DVD's. For example we have one project that is probably 70-80 gb after all is said and done. This would include models, rendering, post production etc. To do this on DVD's would be astronomical not to mention a pain to look up. We are trying to figure a way to backup projects, make them easily accessible in terms of having to go back for additional work and also cost efficient since we would want one set to be in the office and one offsite somewhere incase of fire, theft etc. Does anyone have any ideas? We had thought about external drives rigged into a case but that would be pricey to be buying 2 at a time and we would probably have 10-12 to start with. If we had Hard Drives rigged as raid series my understanding is that if one fails they all fail. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks,

[ecastillor]

I have the same probles.....even though most projects fit in one dvd...some of them require 3 or 4....a tape back up maybe?

[dbarc]

If we had Hard Drives rigged as raid series my understanding is that if one fails they all fail. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

 

If you have the disks rigged for optimal speed then you will have major problems if one of your disks fail. This setup is called raid 0 I think.

 

However for a backup situation you use raid 5. Four disks, three of which hold your data, the fourth acting as a hot spare. If one of your data disks fails, the system should carry on working (no down time) whilst rebuilding onto the hotspare. If two disks go down, it should still keep working, albeit slowly, and then rebuild to optimal performance when you replace the dud disks. If three go down, you're buggered.

 

It looks fairly miraculous when someone demonstrates the redundancy of the system by ripping out 2 of the disks without windows or any running progrms batting an eyelid.

 

So we got one. Trouble is, within a week THREE disks failed simultaneously! But from what I hear this was just incredibily bad luck (a bad batch)

 

Anyway, moving swiftly on (not wanting to relive the trauma), this is what we use for our main server. In terms of backup you really want something you can take off site. We currently use two removable firewire drives, one backing up, the other out of the building. If the office went up in flames, we'd still have all our data (minus the last 12-24 hours) This saved our necks when the raid server went down.

 

However we are currently looking at whether it's worth upgrading to tape. We have the same problem as you with some projects of 50Gb which we would rather store on one media rather than spanning across a few or going through the project deleting unrequired data (which is fraught with danger)

I also don't trust the longevity of DVDs (some of our early CD backups are already unreadable)

 

The trouble with alot of systems you see recommneded on the net is that they aren't geared towards the amounts of data we need to backup. Major corporations may only need 40Gb if they only create Word and Excel docs.

 

At the moment the max capacity of tape seems to be 400Gb. Our server is 800Gb. It's not a problem yet but without buying a hugely expensive system that auto-loads new tapes, it will eventually be sat there in the middle of the night requesting a new tape to complete the backup. There must be a way around this and I'm currently trying to find out how the major animation houses backup what must be many Tbs of data.

 

Can anyone shed any light?

[Harjeet Singh]

The same problems here with us. Currently we have:

 

A. A dedicated backup system with 4x300Gb HDD for daily, incremental backups.

B. A dual layer 8Gb DVD for weekly backup and archive.

 

But as said in the previews post, the reliablility of DVD is yet to be seen. The problems are growin with the data. Need a real trustable and CAPABLE system.

[6 Degrees]

Thanks for the help guys. That helped to shed some light on the subject.

 

Cheers,

 

Duane