Re: Best backup system?

you hear wrong!

A tape based system is by far the safest method of backing up data...its why all the banks and governments use them. They are a known technology, have a good longterm shelf life, and are not likely to fall foul of manufacturers desire to change disk formats every few years.

Hard drives have a very limited shelf, and if not used regularly the magnetic field on a hard drive is known to fade resulting in corrupt data.

I use an Overland Arcvault 24 Tape Library. This holds 24 LTO3 tapes, each capable of up to 800gb of storage. I use this in conjunction with Netvault Backup software to schedule and run all my backups.

You can get much smaller devices, but as i backup 3 macs, and two Raids (14Tb) - i need a big capacity.

Speaking from experience I would not trust hard drives for backing up.

I have twice had raid failures due to faulty drives, and both times i was able to restore my data. Only three weeks ago - I had two drives fail over the weekend, causing complete loss of data from the larger raid, which contains almost 4 years of edit work! After replacing the faulty drives, and 23 hours of automatically rewriting the data, i was good to go again.

Get a tape based system....you'll only regret it if you don't!

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

www.sculptedbliss.co.uk