How do you store your terabytes?

[evilclive]

If you have several terabytes of video data, what media do you use to store them all?

Single-layer DVD+/-R disks offer the most gigabytes per dollar, for now at least, but a cupboardful of them is a hassle to index, and without proper cases they are easily scratched.

A RAID-5 video jukebox is a more satisfactory solution, but you would find it hard to install more than eight hard disks at a time. It's only recently that 400GB and 500GB disks have fallen in price, so there's a fair chance your RAID will consist of disks no larger than 300GB each, limiting the array to about 2TB.

My storage capacity has been built up over five years, so most of my hard disks are 120GB or 160GB. There are far too many of them to keep them all online, so I keep them in a cupboard with a folder of DIR E: printouts, and connect them to an external Firewire caddy when I want to use them.

My New Year's resolution will probably be to tidy up this rather sorry state of affairs.

[mixanobios]

Ive got a second pc as a fileserver. it is a sempron 2800+, 512MB RAM with gentoo linux. The mobo has 8 sata+4ide ports so i have connected 5x300gb Maxtor sata drives and 1x200GB, at a total of 1.6TB. The discs are not in any form of raid, but i have chosen to use Unionfs in order to merge them(ie merge there directory structure) into one large virtual drive (i can still see and alter as i please the contents of each disk). all the disks and the union are exported to my windows pc via samba and gigabit lan. i chose unionfs instead of raid because it gives me the maximum amount of freedom; i can add and remove drives as i please, of varying capacity and filesystems and still have a virtual drive with all my stuff in one place. i dont have to deal with the pains of raid, requirements of same size disks etc. my windows pc has a 200gb disk that has backups from the important stuff in the linux box and some temp space for encodings, installations etc. so i keep whats important in two places or maybe three.

[soulax]

mixanobios, i love the idea of having a "single disk" but what happens if one of those disks crashes? Do you just lose the information on that disk, or is the entire virtual disk now shot?

What do you do for backups?

Currently i have two machines, both have 300GB drive and a 200GB drive, 1/2 terabyte for music and mostly DVD Rips.

Every night the two machines replicate using Robocopy. Im running out of space though...

[mixanobios]

i only loose the data on the crashed disk. the rest of the system continues without problem. because every disk has its own filesystem and it is not raid, i can easily remove and recover the crashed disk on another pc. for backups of important stuff i use the 200gb disk i have on my windows pc.

[Solo]

I have 2 terabytes of HDD space now. No RAID. Of that I have only backed up about 50 GIGS to DVD+R and DVD-R (the cheapest options). Luckily I have a mate I can "sync" my files with so if one of us does lose a drive or two the other one has a copy :D