Let's talk long term storage...

Has anyone put any real thought into long term media storage. We have traditionally just backed up our projects and stored the info on hardrives (on a nice quiet shelf in their original packaging) and loaded them into a firewire drive for uploading into our X-Serve when needed. Well, we had our first drive fail to mount this week, after sitting harmlessly on a shelf for about a year. No biggie, we just had to recapture from the original tapes. Now I am thinking our long term P2 storage solution is somewhat flawed, since recapturing is not an option. Has anyone come up with a viable, and affordable, long term storage solution.

Also, for Jan. Is anyone producing a field "Porta Brace" type of case for the P2 Store?

I had also been think about that. The 2 ways I was thinking was DVD's or this box AJ-HD1200A. It's listed for $21K but I can dump to it. I was getting ready to buy the 1/2 rack DVCPRO 50 deck and with the options it was going to be around $10k. The extra money to have tape back up is worth it. Plus if you use this equipment in your business then it would pay for it's self one day.

-Lars

Here is one option.

Get a CM stacker case http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811119039
put a basic computer together in it and then drop in 12 500 gb drives hooked to this raid controller http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816116033 and you'd have 5.5 terrabytes of raid 5 backed up space. Then just leave the computer off unless you are backing up to it or reading from it. That would run you about $6k. The stacker has excellent cooling ability too, I've got 9 drives in mine and they never heat up. The case is cool to the touch.

Well, in my case, mine actually is my NLE Workstation, but if you wanted it to be separate storage, you could connect it quite a few different ways. Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire 800, Firewire400 eSata, Sata, even SCSI. I prefer to work with files directly on my system. I'd just use it to store files long term. In response to some of the other replys, yes, you would want to use a UPS, and yes, static electricity is a concern, but all you really need to do is ground your case to the ground in an outlet and then you won't have any ESD concerns. Basically I'm suggesting what apples sales http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/ , but just doing it for half as much. Of course their method has those cool little apple's on them, but I don't personally think that is worth 6K :) I do know that apple's xserve is reliable since that is what one of the local tv stations uses for 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 HD editing. The other nice thing about the CM Stacker (and no, I don't work for them) and one of the reasons I bought mine, is that there is room for a lot of hard drives and a lot of DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drives and room for a pcmcia adapter for the hvx200

I forgot to ask that hope you have a very safe UPS behind the stacker.
Think about massive electric shock that brakes every hdd inside.
Or maybe two sets of hdd's where the others are always power off when
the others are on...

Let's see what year these holographic storages will really be on the market.
One thing that is better with them than with massive hdd systems is that you can't accidentally erase gigabytes of footage if you use write-once disks.