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03/30/2006 11:25:09 AM · #1 |
I work with a team that produces graphic design, web design, and videos. We currently archive our work by burning DVD-Rs of completed jobs (two copies of each DVD). Our video guys burn their own DVDs, since they take up more space. We keep the files of completed projects in case we need to revise it, or just reprint it.
However, we're finding it to be cumbersome to have a good tracking system to easily find archived jobs, and to store a backup copy of each DVD off-site. Also, it's not uncommon for us to find that files on the archive disks are irretrievable. We've also heard that burned DVDs (and CDs) may not last as long as previously thought.
We're thinking there are better solutions out there for archiving; maybe terabyte hard drives, maybe online archiving.
Does anyone here have experience or knowledge they'd like to share about this? We'd like to be able to access the past five years (or more) of our produced work.
Thanks in advance for any help you may offer. |
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03/30/2006 11:34:43 AM · #2 |
Do you have a general idea of how much data you'd be wanting to place in the archive to begin with (from your old DVDs)? At what rate does your team accumlulate new data (it's probably not constant)?
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03/30/2006 11:58:03 AM · #3 |
Very good questions--and hard to answer, at least right this minute (I'm not a designer myself, and I haven't been a full-on project manager for a couple years).
It's definitely not constant, but a typical graphic job could be about 50 MB. Right now, our design capacity for work is a little lower than normal, so...maybe two a month, plus some video...much larger at about a DVD's worth a month...I'd guesstimate it at 10 GB per month for now, subject to revision after I gather more info.
Also, I'm going to try and see how much we already have archived on DVDs and CDs today.
Message edited by author 2006-03-30 12:01:38.
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03/30/2006 02:22:22 PM · #4 |
OK, it looks like we have about 170 GB worth of previous archives, and about 150 GB worth of archived video. Call it 300 GB total. Most likely, all of that would be moved to any new system we went to.
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03/30/2006 08:00:04 PM · #5 |
Bump for the east coast evening crowd (and kirbic if you're around).
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03/30/2006 08:05:36 PM · #6 |
Sounds like a RAID storage array would be an ideal solution. There are pre-manufactured arrays that have hot-swappable drives so if one fails, you plug in another drive and keep on running without ever having to shut down. Sooner or later, a drive WILL fail, and this gives some additional data security.
You still need to replicate that data set off-site, and for that renting some space somewhere is what you want. Initially, you might want to do something other than upload all the data, but for incremental additions, updates run on off-hours should work fine. Now you have an in-house copy, an off-site copy, and you should have backups to the offsite copy built into the price of the space :-)
Edit: If you have 300GB now, buy at least 2x, better 3x that space to grow into. Your rate of data accumulation will increase, so the actual data stored will grow exponentially. Try to plan for a 3 to 4-year life for the in-house array.
Message edited by author 2006-03-30 20:07:08.
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03/30/2006 08:49:36 PM · #7 |
Thanks for the information! I'll have to do some more research about costs and renting space (I assume you mean online backup) in the office tomorrow.
Thanks again. |
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