21st century data backup

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by sunburst79

21st Century data backup. Truthfully to me this would imply storage in the form of cloud storage. What I think would be cool would be to have a group of users or studios get together and figure out a way to mirror their data on secure server shares. Example.... say 6-12 DUC members get together and build a "Mesh". Your chances of any single machine going down are minimal. The chance of losing the whole network would be almost impossible. The only drawbacks I see is keeping the individuals data secure and some type of effective non lossy compression. Given the price of 2TB drives it wouldn't be to hard to build something with enough capacity.

While not a replacement for local HDD backups something like this could take the place of the backup of a backup thats off site.
No reason that all of this sycronization could be happening automatically during idle time.

Think something like Mozy thats self administered.

Interesting idea. It would depend on the project, and probably how well you know the other people you are sharing the network with. I could see a risk if you are storing unreleased, not-yet-copyrighted, or stuff you signed an NDA for, but I think it could be a great way to have automated offsite backup between a small group of people you trust.

Of course there's a lot of stuff out there already that is not automated but fairly easy and painless to use. I do a lot of work with a programmer overseas, and we will often upload files to each other for remote backup. For a while I was using my slowbileme account, but we've been using dropbox recently and it's really easy for quickly sharing files.

[necjamc]

Although I yet to own one, I would imagine 21st century back - up will probably be SSD. a 30GB drive now is from 140 - 400 dollars though

[necjamc]

Or 160GB from Intel for $450 But i'm sure there is no data on extremes and how the drive's hold up over the years.

[Craig F]

those are still tiny for backup

I'm in the Cloud camp for future of backup

[necjamc]

Small now, but when they are cheap, and big I think they will be great.
Of course my opinion

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by necjamc

Small now, but when they are cheap, and big I think they will be great.
Of course my opinion

Don't get me wrong, I am a huge SSD proponent, but I think backup is probably the worst use for them. SSD's are all about SPEED!!! it would be a shame to waste that by letting them lie dormant with backup data. The performance you gain from these drives is best used for your boot drive or for streaming samples/playing back high track count sessions. When SSD's become cheaper than HDD's per GB, then we will see about using them for backup....

But on that subject, one other thing to consider is when an SSD is erased, the data is gone forever, there aren't traces left behind that can be recovered like on an HDD platter. However SSD's and flash drives should be able to retain data for up to 10 years from what I've read, which is why I like using cheap usb flash drives to store stuff.