I work for a small industrial design company, and we have been steadily growing for the past few years. I have received numerous offers from my clients requesting that we archive their graphics data for them. These data files are incredibly large and I have had to buy more computers just to hold all the files. We currently archive data for few clients whose graphics we work with on a day-to-day basis, but have become more and more concerned about data-loss or file corruption. We are completely liable if we were ever to lose them. This scares me, and I would not want the whole company to go under if that were to happen in the case of a fire, theft, or some other unforseen incident.
Here’s what I want:
I only want the files in the office if they are being used, and would like them taken to the safety deposit box at the end of the day. But this wastes valuable time.
I have considered a fireproof safe. Are they absolutely safe?
I have considered a high-speed wireless data-transfer service, but I am worried about data corruption, both during compression as well as transfer. Then, are there services that can store files of this magnitude for use on a daily basis? I have heard of data compression software for on-line transfers, is this completely safe. Are there new high speed data transfer services that are 100%corruption free?
I hope you can understand why I am being as picky as I am.
Does anyone know any viable alternatives before I plunge head first into this thing?
Back the files up to tape or CD media and get an account with a local media storage company. Depending on your needs, they can pick them up and store them offsite as often as daily. Unless you are in a very small town, there should be one where you live. There are only 120,000 folks where I live, and we have one. If you go with tape, do some research to find the rotation method that best serves your needs.
For the files currently in use, you should also have a complete backup strategy in place. That involves multiple backup sets, keeping one offsite and one on-site, incremental daily backups of changes, etc.
If this is a big concern, you should hire a consultant if you don’t know what you are doing. Data archiving can be tricky at times. You need to know the limitations of each method.
If you are in a medium NT environment, Then I have always found DLT tape drives to be a fairly good way to handle on site backups. It’s a little expensive($1000 or so for the drive, and $50ish for a 40-80 gig tape). But the backup and recover are fast, and I have never had reliabliity problem.
Whenever I hear of people trying backup schemes, I always worry if they’ve ever tested them and tried to RESTORE from those schemes. I recently tested a restore on one of my most hardcore backup, and it took about a DAY to restore all the files. Maybe I shoulda done it without compression…
Anyway, this storage issue sounds like something for serious professional attention, I’ve done some work like this for museums and if I was stuck with liablilty for data integrity (as you apparently are), I’d be asking for serious money.
Depending on how much data you have and how often you plan on taking data offsite, you might also want to check out tape libraries. If you are super paranoid this can be good for mirroring backups for onsite and offsite storage, and besides changing tapes daily is a pain in the bum … Some good tape library companies are ADIC, ATL, and Dell. I’m sure there is more but these are the ones I have used personally.
Chas.E- It took us a day to restore as well when we lost a shelf. We knew it would be tough though as we traded backup speed for restore time when we selected compression and data stream multiplexing. We just got in a ADIC Scaler 1000 with 12 DLT 8000 drives, so we hope to get our backup window back down to 8 hours again
Yeah, I just did a job with a major company with major throughput, they do insurance transactions on a network of AS/400s with a 2.5 terabyte RAID, and they have a major tape library happening. I was impressed with their backup facility. They had everything short of a tape robot, they had a couple of staff members in the master control room constantly doing nothing but handle tapes. I love seeing a serious facility. The programs I wrote for them probably only took a couple of inches of tape to backup… ha…
