Cloud Services

[Coss]

Cost no object I would think two physically well separated, maybe in different countries, storage servers with some 50-100Mbps broadband connection to each from wherever you happen to be. The storage servers presumably RAID as well and a nice secure vpn tunnel to the servers.

 

mmmm... RAID..... this was my problem in the first great data loss, all my dodgy USB drives were in a RAID set up and when they all died, so did the RAID

 

I lost about 3 years of sporadic footage in Thailand and Cambodia and Laos that I was planning to make into a Docco, I eventually did make a little 45 minute thing, but the lost footage would have made a series.

 

Not to mention personal photos of my family etc etc etc

 

The 4+TB of movies/TV is an issue as obviously I can't keep them on my laptop and then back them up. They are currently stored on 3 x 2TB WD portable HD's but these in turn need to be backed up. So planning to get and store them all on a 6TB WD desktop HD which can then be plugged directly into a smart TV and then the 3 x 2 TB's will act as back up to this. Unless anyone has any better suggestions?

 

Then they all get stolen, is what happened to me Xmas 2013/14, fortunately they missed the one Hdd, that had the back up of my laptop on it, so I bought a new laptop and got back into the digital world. Before I discovered this back up had not been stolen, I was seriously thinking about giving up on the digital world, going back to cash and a small black (paper) notebook.

 

I don't know if I've posted this before, but Munchie will know of the Temple just down the road from my land, whereon I was walking past one day shortly after the theft, and the head Monk called me in, he'd obviously heard of the theft, it being a small community, he spoke reasonable English being foreign educated and he gave me a talk on the impermanence of physical possessions, and then he gave me an amulet, a real blessed one, so I'm on the road to Nirvana, cured, if you will, of the lust for possessions.

 

Subsequently I passed on the Amulet and the merit contained therein to a 6 year old in the family, it was like she'd been given a new personality, so radiant she became. I digress.

 

I think I'll investigate solid state drives and see what their life span is, like Radioman, I don't have too much faith in consumer grade HDDs.

 

Any comments on solid state drives apart from expense?

[baa99]

At 90MB/s it would take over 12 hrs to copy 4TB. That's using a USB3 connection. A USB2 connection would take 3 times the time. Using a 1Mb/s upload connection would take more than a year to backup.

 

It looks like DropBox has a $15/month unlimited plan.

[The_Munchmaster]

At 90MB/s it would take over 12 hrs to copy 4TB. That's using a USB3 connection.

 

So? You just start it and let it get on with it, you don't have to sit and watch it all the time, ffs!!

[BelgianBoy]

I have been using NAS since a couple of years, great results......

 

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2402433,00.asp

 

BB

[radioman]

Couple of points to add.

 

USB drives in a RAID setup, hmm, not good methinks also if they all died, simultaneously, weird. USB drives tend to be SATA or earlier ones IDE. Once stripped from the casing the raw drive would then plug in to a legacy port so if it were the USB controller bit that failed the data should still be recoverable. If the RAID setup was RAID0, data striping, then you tread a very precarious path. RAID0 stripes the data across multiple drives. Lose one drive and you've lost the lot. My advice would be never use RAID0 alone. RAID1 mirrors data across drives so you get the same data on two or more drives. Needs more storage space, cheap enough today, and is redundant in that any single disk failure doesn't cause data loss. There are a bunch of other RAID modes most of which hold little interest for the consumer end of the market. Combination of RAID0+1gives both a speed increase and redundancy, just don't use 0 on its own.

 

I use NAS boxes both at my temporary location and at home. I can access both from anywhere and they are fine for securing and sharing data provided the files are not huge. As baa99 says 4TB at 1MB/s would take over a year, one of my NAS drives is still a 100Mb/s ethernet connection, hmm that would take a while.

 

Setting something to work and leaving it to get on with it is a fantastic idea, in a perfect world. My experience with such actions is that they usually end in tears. Assuming that the copy routine can handle such numbers then finding one bad bit of data somewhere in the scheme may well cause the whole process to come to a grinding halt. But you wont know about it until you are something like 8 or 10 hours into the copy, grrr! Doing it in smaller batches helps but that requires manual intervention.

 

What you might be trying to achieve is both sensible and worthwhile I think, but a little planning is certainly a smart idea. Also if someone could just please bring forward the 100GB/s wire line link or better 1TB/s, ooh and at least 1GB/s global internet. By that time however I suspect all our media files will be 4K or maybe 16K.

[cavanami]

Cisco makes a very secure RAID system, but get ready to pay some $$$

[radioman]

It's really the difference between the consumer and commercial market I think. I've built RAID0+1 destop server machines before but I'm not sure I would want to use them in commercial applications. Certainly not where I work. Storage requirements for radar and communication data used in air traffic tend to be pretty robust.

 

Even with laptops there is a big difference. I had a Lenovo about 2 years ago. Best laptop I ever had. Better build quality than the MacBook that I use today, but it was from their pro range and cost more than a MacBook. You gets what you pays for is still true.

[Coss]

Couple of points to add.

 

USB drives in a RAID setup, hmm, not good methinks also if they all died, simultaneously, weird. USB drives tend to be SATA or earlier ones IDE. Once stripped from the casing the raw drive would then plug in to a legacy port so if it were the USB controller bit that failed the data should still be recoverable. If the RAID setup was RAID0, data striping, then you tread a very precarious path. RAID0 stripes the data across multiple drives. Lose one drive and you've lost the lot. My advice would be never use RAID0 alone. .....

 

.....By that time however I suspect all our media files will be 4K or maybe 16K.

 

What happened was, I was doing video at a time when I couldn't afford the speeds and disks available today, I had a firewire set up for the actual working rig and a RAID0 to back up to, using USB 2 external drives. Then an identical RAID0 to back up to from the 1st RAID0, using USB 2 external drives. All because I needed speed.

 

After completing a back up I would then back up the back up. When the 1st RAID0 failed from one of the disks going stage left, I found that the second RAID0 was lying when it said it had the files. I even went back to the importer of the enclosures and discovered, that the controller's software was being found to be, at best, dodgy, with Mac OS 9, I think it was back then.

 

And they suggested that it was all due to some inferior software coming out of China, these were the days when people only thought, that perhaps China would become a force in the tech world and we were just getting used to the idea that Thailand, could make serviceable Hdds without bits of Som Tam flying out of them when you fired them up.

 

4K? 16K? makes my thoughts about getting back into video, daunting.