How do I backup a 2TB raid?

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Brothernod

Limp Gawd
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Sep 29, 2001
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So my friend has a 2TB raid with a lot of video editing related content and I want him to back that up onto something offline that he can store elsewhere (for fire safety and such).

The best idea I have would be to grab an eSATA enclosure and 5x500GB drives then use them like large floppy disks with some backup software once a week or something like that.

Is this possible? Cost is a HUGE concern as it's basically cheap or nothing and I really don't want his raid to be a single point of failure incase of fire or electrical surge or who knows what.

Thank you.
 
What is your definition of cheap? There's not a whole lot of options. If you want a reliable method of backup, he's going to have to pay for it. The 1TB drives would make more sense to me. Grab a couple and get some SATA or USB2.0 enclosures. Not the perfect solution but it's better than nothing.
 
Well any sort of tape solution is going to run a couple grand from what little research I've done.

With the 500GB drives he's only paying $0.21 per GB, even deeply discounted the 750gb drives are around $0.23 and 1TB drives are like $0.26, so I think a 500GB drive is the sweet spot, though having 5 of them may be a bit clumsy...
 
What are the videos of? What format were they originally on?
 
So, does he need to backup everything (raw footage, edited footage, titles, graphics, EDL's, etc...).
The Raw footage wouldn't need to be backed up if it is on Tape (miniDV, DVCam, DVC) or Dvd Disc (not sure what acquisition format was used). Backing up the Raw footage if it is already on one of the above formats would be a redundant waste.

Edited projects should have been put to Disc or tape. (digital backup to hard drive as well just for the sake of saving time if you need to do something with it).
EDL's, Graphics, titles, etc can be backed up to External HD's along with the edited footage.

that is what I would do.

We do a lot of wedding videos so after ours is completed and put onto DVD, the raw footage is deleted from the drives. (we keep the miniDV raw footage for about 24 months then we get rid of it, we will keep some Raw footage tapes that we use to assemble demo videos).
 
"We keep two types of files on our Server. The finished, archived files. These files are the timelines and the media that accompany it allowing us to manipulate the final copies of our work. The other type is the raw material that is not backed up on tape. Five months ago we started shooting everything directly to hard drives and while that’s convenient we no longer have tape back ups for that stuff. So that needs to be backed up as well. "
 
Brothernod said:
Well any sort of tape solution is going to run a couple grand from what little research I've done.

With the 500GB drives he's only paying $0.21 per GB, even deeply discounted the 750gb drives are around $0.23 and 1TB drives are like $0.26, so I think a 500GB drive is the sweet spot, though having 5 of them may be a bit clumsy...
Click to expand...


Exactly. Even though the larger drives cost a bit more, you have less of them to maintain. You don't want to juggle around these disks like they're CDs or tapes.
 
Rocco123 said:
Exactly. Even though the larger drives cost a bit more, you have less of them to maintain. You don't want to juggle around these disks like they're CDs or tapes.
Click to expand...

You also have more to lose if a drive fails. While it is a "backup", it is still a higher exposure risk. My rule of thumb is never put more than 10% of your backup data on single device/entity.
 
Rocco123 said:
Exactly. Even though the larger drives cost a bit more, you have less of them to maintain. You don't want to juggle around these disks like they're CDs or tapes.
Click to expand...

exactly


if it's that important, buy a tape drive and 10 200gb tapes... store offsite
 
Really you should figure out what software that you are going to leverage to do this backup with and figure out the limitations that the application has and then decide on the hardware from that point. What I would suggest is using a product such as NovaNET 11 where the software application will use multiple data streams to backup to perspective device that you will leverage to do this. Here is a download link for this application:

http://www.novastor.com/pub/demos/novanet/nnet11/nnet11sp1.zip

If you need help setting this up let me know and I'd be more then happy helping you.
 
I am not sure what route you want to go, but I hear drobo is pretty amazing. It will dynamically balance all of your data and spread it out across the Hard disk drives and the led's will let you know when they are full. Watch the Drobo demo video in the products tab to see all the features it has. It is $449.99 without the hard drives.

http://www.drobo.com/
 
+1 Drobo FTW! (or any other easy external backup solution)

When dealing with video editing stuff, it is easiest to do 1:1 backups of the hard drives. You can run into problems if you pick and choose data from your projects to save. You'll go to reload the project later from the backup, and it won't open properly because you might have missed something. If you don't save all the captured video as it is, if you recapture and reload the backed up project file, nothing will match up because all the time codes are different and video files might be named differently. I've ran into that problem once.
 
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