Been doing some housekeeping, part of which is cleaning up and standardizing HDD arrays. One of
the sucky things about RAID is you need each physical disk to be the
same size otherwise the space just sits there empty. As such needed to
shuffle a bunch of data around and realized its time to put all my ITCH
data into cold storage - have not touched it for quite some time.
All
up its about 1.5TB worth compressed, decompressed probably 5-6TB or so.
There`s a few options out there for this level of data backup
1) disconnected HDD
2) cloud backup service
3) burn optical disks
Option
1) would be the most obvious choice. HDD are cheap, transfers are fast.
In theory HDDs are less robust than optical media due to moving
parts/bearing failure vs non-moving part.
Option
2) just dosent work for TBs of data. Amazon Glacier costs ~ $0.01c / GB
/ month which isnt so bad, the killer is the bandwidth cost of $0.20c /
GB to retrieve the data. Pushing total cost significantly above the
cost of HDD or optical. Guess if you factor in redundancy into the HDD
or optical storage size and Amazon isnt that bad. Still just not
comfortable with a fixed monthly cost vs a onetime expenditure.
Which
leaves Option 3) Optical, meaning BluRay 25GB & 50GB disks. The
media costs are quite a lot less than a HDD cost -> 50 disks @ 25GB
each is around $30 == 1.25TB. But its a complete pain in the ass to burn
that many. Ended up writing a script to almost automate the whole,
copy, burn, verify cycle with a single disk taking around 3H in total.
In
total its taken about a month to burn the dataset. Some days would get
5-6 disks done, others 1 or 0. But there`s some sort of piece of mind I
get from having data backed up in ROM. where only sunlight and a hammer
can delete the files.
