What is the safest and least expensive way to store 10 terabytes of data?
I'm a member of a production company and we're preparing for our first feature film. We've been discussing methods of data storage to keep all of our original content safe (for as long as possible). While we understand data is never 100% safe, we'd like to find the safest solution for us.
We've considered:
16TB NAS for on-site storage
4-5 2TB hard drives (cheap, but not redundant), copy original footage to drives then seal in static free bag
Burn data to Blu-Ray disks (time consuming and expensive: 200 disks == $5000)
Tape drive(s)?
I know the least about tape drives, except the fact that they're more reliable than disks. Any experience/knowledge with this amount of data is hugely appreciated.
This assumes you're going for an archive rather than regular backup or live data.
Go for a set of SATA hard drives (1 or 2 TB), plus a few extras. Copy your data onto the disks. Use QuickPar (or an archiver which support parity volumes) to create additional parity files. Distribute parity files among your hard disks.
The parity info will allow you to reconstruct files if you have enough parity files left. So if one disk dies but other disks with parity info still work, you can use the parity files to reconstruct the original.
For more redundancy, do it all twice and store at separate locations.
If you're really paranoid, store a PCI and PCI Express to SATA controller at each site too!
Edit: Heck, if paranoia is what it's all about, go the whole hog and store a PC with gigabit ethernet at each site capable of reading the disks!
The LTO4 drives we use can cram in 800GB per tape. The downside is the cost of the drives themselves. If you balked at the $5K for Blu-Ray disks, you're not going to like the cost of LTO4. On the other hand, the cartages themselves are pretty cheap on a per-GB basis so you can keep a lot of copies. These tapes have a good shelf-life, but you do need to plan to move them to new media as you replace your tape drive. From how you describe how you're going to use this storage, I don't think tape is a good fit. Not unless this is going to be a backup solution instead of an archive solution. Different problems.
You might want to consider some kind of cloud based backup vendor for this, if your daily net-change is small enough. Of course, this depends on how beefy your Internet connection is, and restoring from it could be equally painful. These services are pretty new, so its unknown how they handle the bankruptcy problem for your data; what happens to it if they go out of business?
Local disk storage is definitely a way to go. A drive enclosure with easily swapped drives is probably your best bet considering your cost constraints. If you can live with that data offline, then go for it. Disks are cheap, and disk-enclosures are cheaper than tape drives. Fewer moving parts.
I'm assuming you're needing this for archive, not active usage in a video role. If it is, that's a different storage problem.
In your NAS research, have you looked at the DroboPro or DroboElite self-managed storage devices?
Consider what the cost would be if you lost some/all of your footage and budget accordingly ;)
Have you considered hosted services? I am not sure how the price weighs up, but you may want to consider a hosting service that sells bulk storage. Maybe AWS?