Ask Slashdot: Best Offline Storage Method For Large Archives?

An anonymous reader writes "I have a collection of large projects (Indesign files with associated images), which are typically 40GB to 60GB each. In this current climate, what is the 'best' method of archiving these? Spinny magnets? Solid state drives? USB? Tape? Blu-ray? All have pros and cons and price considerations. If I remove the price issue (my data is important to me), does this change the choice?"

Re:Rotational media

[Mad Merlin]

I concur on this point, online storage really makes the most sense. Cheap, high performance (for sequential read/write) and easily expandable. You can get a single machine with dozens of SATA drives in it (including the drives) for way under 5 figures. When drives fail, they're simple to replace, and every couple years, migrate the whole thing to newer (faster, bigger) drives. Mirror your data unless you don't care about it. RAID 1/10 for really small datasets (2-4 drives), RAID 6 for moderate size datasets (5-10 drives) and RAID 60 for anything bigger.

A very important note to keep in mind... stay away from hardware RAID! When your controller dies, so does all your data, unless you have an identical spare controller card (buy it up front, they won't exist in a couple years). The same goes for fake RAID (ie, software RAID driven by the BIOS), but s/controller card/motherboard/g;. Pure software RAID (ie, using mdadm) is a safe bet.

Re:BitTorrent hash check

[QRDeNameland]

Yeah, that's a great solution if all you want to do is detect corruption, but note the GP's point about havng "a good chance of recovering from it". The only way to recover with BitTorrent is to have another copy available to replace any bad blocks. PAR2, on the other hand, is able to recover any random missing X% of data from a dataset as long as X% of PAR2 data was generated.

Re:Rotational media

[vegiVamp]

Fully concur, and let me sum it up: The best type of long-term storage is "redundant".