No budget back up advice

[Jules]

I have been making 2 X DDS3 retrospect DATA DAT copies

1 x For the studios safety archive
1 x For the clients safety copy

Sessions normally are tracked on the UW fast SCSI drives

And backed up mid project on internal ATA drives

We use a Firewire drive to transfer work between A & B rooms (and for back up space over run)

When we are done we do the DDS3 data DAT thing

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I DO like the cheapness of giving clients a DDS / Retrospect DATA DAT tape to take away so I think I want to stick with this.

My question is - instead of a library of DATA DAT safety copies of individual projects, should my studio be archiving ATA or Firewire drives of say, 10-20 projects?

Could DVD play a part?

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I just discovered I have been paying 3 x the fair price for Data dats for the last 4 years...



Your thoughts?

Thanks in advance

[picksail]

Hey Jules,

How's it going?

I have obsessed about this for years. I have tried practically every backup/archival solution. After serious deliberation I determined that I am OK with both DVD and FW.

Throughout the duration of the session I prefer to backup to as many mediums as are available. e.g. tape, CD, DVD,FW, and a network of about 4 computer IDE system drives.

I was never completely satisfied with performance or shelf-life of DAT.

[Chris Cavell]

I agree with picksail; I've run into problems moreso with DDS than any other backup medium. While we have DDS, I currently use DVD, DVD-RAM, CD's on very rare occasions, and HD's. I'll typically buy a big drive for large archival backups every few months as needed, pop it in a spare firewire case and copy everything over freeing up some of my reglar backup media once I know I'm good and done with the material. Once done, grab a pack of silica gel (us south dwellers need it!) and a zip lock, swap out the drive and stick the bagged archive in the safe.

[TDMnovice]

I spent 2 years as an archivist for a software company. My gig was to backup of all of the creative dept's files daily, typically 30 GBs or so. I started out with DAT and had such terrible luck that I changed to DLT. In both cases the tape was fairly reliable, but what wasn't reliable was the decks. The head alignment would go off with so much use and then older tapes became useless. Because the heads migrated over time, getting a new deck only meant that you could now use the first few tapes from when the old deck was new.

Use FW drives and DVDs, both at the same time and give the DVDs to the client.

[Anibal]

when you use DVDs, do you copy files straight forward or you use Retrospect?

[Jeffrey Talbot]

well what I do is to archive incrementally the ATA drives, mostly when projects are finished.. then at the end of the year to a new clean back up of the entire drive.

so generally, everything is filed by date... and if it was done in 2002, then all I need is the back ups for 2003 and it'll be there.

I used to use DDS-4 but recently upgraded to Firewire Exabyte, but the process is the same..

frequent back ups of the back up drive, and yearly, clean back ups of the same drive

Good luck

[PTLance]

Hi Jules, we have been using AIT tapes with a lot of success. We also back up to DLT tapes but have had the problem of head alignment. I must say it seems now that DVD may be the best way to go.

[Philthy]

I backup with Firewire drives here, but I have recently heard a disturbing rumour that hard drives may seize up after long periods of disuse. You should spin them up once in a while if you go that route.

It would be a shame to lose 20 projects in one shot.

[Philthy]

Oh, and if you want seriously cheap hard drive backups, consider getting a firewire dock and then just buying raw ATA drives- you can get the price down to $.75 per gig that way.

[frenchman]

What are you guys using as backup software (if any) ?

My "killer" solution (Exabyte Mammoth + mezzo software) has been bogged down with problems lately : Mammoth AME tapes are outrageously expensive and current versions of Mezzo software do not work properly on my system.
So I am stuck with Retrospect and FW drives and DVD

I mirror on a Firewire drive while work is in progress and DVD at the very end like many people here.

I don't like Retrospect as it creates this huge file that only it can open. So I am presently trying several OSX synchronising software for mirroring on the FW drive, but I am not yet fully satisfied.