How Do You Backup 20TB of Data? 983
Sean0michael writes "Recently I had a friend lose their entire electronic collection of music and movies by erasing a RAID array on their home server. He had 20TB of data on his rack at home that had survived a dozen hard drive failures over the years. But he didn't have a good way to backup that much data, so he never took one. Now he wishes he had.
Asking around among our tech-savvy friends though, no one has a good answer to the question, 'how would you backup 20TB of data?'. It's not like you could just plug in an external drive, and using any cloud service would be terribly expensive. Blu-Ray discs can hold a lot of data, but that's a lot of time (and money) spent burning discs that you likely will never need. Tape drives are another possibility, but are they right for this kind of problem? I don' t know. There might be something else out there, but I still have no feasible solution.
So I ask fellow slashdotters: for a home user, how do you backup 20TB of Data?" Even Amazon Glacier is pretty pricey for that much data.
Asking around among our tech-savvy friends though, no one has a good answer to the question, 'how would you backup 20TB of data?'. It's not like you could just plug in an external drive, and using any cloud service would be terribly expensive. Blu-Ray discs can hold a lot of data, but that's a lot of time (and money) spent burning discs that you likely will never need. Tape drives are another possibility, but are they right for this kind of problem? I don' t know. There might be something else out there, but I still have no feasible solution.
So I ask fellow slashdotters: for a home user, how do you backup 20TB of Data?" Even Amazon Glacier is pretty pricey for that much data.
Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
I would say use floppies, but I'm kind of old and out of touch now.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2, Funny)
I would say use floppies, but I'm kind of old and out of touch now.
5 1/4" or 3 1/2"?
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
5 1/4" or 3 1/2"?
8". How young are you?
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Funny)
My solution (Score:5, Funny)
Figure out the theory of everything.
Then you can always recompute your data from scratch.
Re:reduce the amount (Score:5, Funny)
I do the exact same thing with high res pictures. I immediately will take the full resolution raw image and convert it down to a 320px gif. Or maybe a 10% quality jpeg. You get great economy that way too. Who wants to keep a 30+MB image around when you can have almost the same thing in 10kB instead!
Why back it up at all... ask the NSA for a restore (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Funny)
Neither, 8" floppies would be the way to go.
Hard sectored or soft sectored?
It would be best to decide up front before putting in the order for 80 million disks.
Connect a raspberry pi and (Score:5, Funny)
Connect a raspberry pi and configure it as a backup server and let it copy all to /dev/null... ...
Then put aside the money you would have invested in a "better" solution, put it in a safe bank (under your mattress)
and wait until you need to restore something..
Most probably you'll enjoy the money more
Re:Another RAID? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Punched paper tape has better longevity than either floppies or optical media.
If you're going for *actual* longevity, you can't beat fired clay tablets. (Yeah, I know they weren't fired originally, but you have to decide how much you value your MP3 files. I'd certainly take the extra time!)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Boxcars / Gigabyte (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Seed a torrent of it as an encrypted file named "porn.zip" or similar. You'll have it backed up on the cloud for free in no time and available for all of eternity.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:math majors (Score:5, Funny)
Now this joke has really come full circle.
Re:Boxcars / Gigabyte (Score:4, Funny)
Well sure, latency is a bitch but imagine the throughput once it got moving!