Re: Backup strategy for your SAN ?

Chrispy,

You've hit the "hot button" for anyone entering the "shared storage" pool. Now that you've placed all of your eggs in one basket, what happens when that basket breaks? Mr. Z has outlined some of the LTO options and they are recognized by IT professionals as the most economical, viable choices for back up. I'd suggest that you choose one and use it.

The bigger your bucket, the harder/more expensive it is to have a complete back up in place. It really comes down to money. You can have a complete mirrored SAN off-site for 100% disaster recovery capability, but you've increased your costs by over 100%. Most post houses simply can't afford this. Video editors have an advantage over the IT world in that our original data (media) is coming off of an existing data storage format (videotape), and by definition, that is a backup. The project files are infinitely smaller, and therefore more easily backed up. We insist that editors back up their project files three places: locally (to their local drives), globablly (to the SAN), and mobilly (USB drives).

Our storage pool is too big to deal with LTO tapes, but we're using a reliable SAN (X-SAN) with dependable storage (Active Storage). It's been in operation for over 5 years now, and we've yet to lose any media (other than to operator error). Plenty of drives have failed, but that's what RAID 5 is for.

There are other pieces to this issue that contribute to your data integrity: Back up power supply, and most importantly, adequate air conditioning. Almost all of our drive failures can be traced to the few times that our AC has conked out.

Here's my take on it. Your original camera tapes/discs/chips are your ultimate back up. If you have a project that's close to the finish line with a deadline looming, you may want to back up just the media for that project. Unless you have a complete mirrored SAN, the time to restore from LTO tapes will take so long that you'll miss your deadline anyway. So, back up your project files regularly and to multiple places, but pick and choose what media you want to back up. That's just my opinion. I'm sure others will differ, but there is no "right choice", only what makes sense for your situation considering budget, deadlines, and "tolerance for failure".

Good luck.

mark