Please Share Your MultiMedia Storage Strategies?

I estimate my digital content to be growing at about 100GB/yr. Blame it
on a growing collection of RAW, MP3, MPEG-2, and AVI files. As well as a
desire to host my own website.

I want to de-couple the storage and backup of this increasingly
priceless library from the PCs where's it currently stored (currently a
deskside and a laptop, on a home LAN).

I'm looking for suggestions/strategies for designing a home multimedia
storage solution that will be comfortably scalable over the next 10+
years. Specifically, I'd like to be able to:

1. Add a SATA or IDE "big" drive (200+G) or 2 a year.
2. Implement automated back up of all the content to a redundant drive
subsystem. I would like to avoid backing up the content to DVDs if I
can, in part because I have vague concerns about the compatibility over
time of DVD+/-Rs and the reliability/compatibility over time of DVD+/-RWs.

I currently generate most of my content using a 6MP DSLR and a MiniDV
camcorder. I anticipate moving to a 12+MP DSLR and a HDV camcorder
within a couple of years, greatly increasing the growth rate of my
storage needs.

I currently use only WinXP/NTFS but I can envision adding a Mac to the
LAN at some point, and I'm not opposed to rolling my own, say, Linux
server (although I'm concerned about the increased maintainance efforts
of a mixed-mode environment)

Any suggestions? What are *your* strategies?

Bill

From: "Bill"

| I estimate my digital content to be growing at about 100GB/yr. Blame it
| on a growing collection of RAW, MP3, MPEG-2, and AVI files. As well as a
| desire to host my own website.
|
| I want to de-couple the storage and backup of this increasingly
| priceless library from the PCs where's it currently stored (currently a
| deskside and a laptop, on a home LAN).
|
| I'm looking for suggestions/strategies for designing a home multimedia
| storage solution that will be comfortably scalable over the next 10+
| years. Specifically, I'd like to be able to:
|
| 1. Add a SATA or IDE "big" drive (200+G) or 2 a year.
| 2. Implement automated back up of all the content to a redundant drive
| subsystem. I would like to avoid backing up the content to DVDs if I
| can, in part because I have vague concerns about the compatibility over
| time of DVD+/-Rs and the reliability/compatibility over time of DVD+/-RWs.
|
| I currently generate most of my content using a 6MP DSLR and a MiniDV
| camcorder. I anticipate moving to a 12+MP DSLR and a HDV camcorder
| within a couple of years, greatly increasing the growth rate of my
| storage needs.
|
| I currently use only WinXP/NTFS but I can envision adding a Mac to the
| LAN at some point, and I'm not opposed to rolling my own, say, Linux
| server (although I'm concerned about the increased maintainance efforts
| of a mixed-mode environment)
|
| Any suggestions? What are *your* strategies?
|
| Bill

With the content you describe you should look into to USB v2.0/FireWire or SCSI tape backup
solutions such as DLT or AIT-II.

I personally use a combination of DVD and SCSI tape.

--
Dave
http://www.claymania.com/removal-trojan-adware.html
http://www.ik-cs.com/got-a-virus.htm

John A. Stovall wrote:


Not unless it's a raid 5 system.

Have you considered a Network Appliance?



David H. Lipman wrote:


With the content you describe you should look into to USB
v2.0/FireWire or SCSI tape backup
solutions such as DLT or AIT-II.

I personally use a combination of DVD and SCSI tape.


Thanks for the suggestions.

I checked out Network Appliance, and it seems to be enterprise-class h/w
& solns. I couldn't even find a price or a home lan configuration

I'll investigate SCSI DLT.

Bill

Bill wrote:
I estimate my digital content to be growing at about 100GB/yr. Blame
it on a growing collection of RAW, MP3, MPEG-2, and AVI files. As
well as a desire to host my own website.

I want to de-couple the storage and backup of this increasingly
priceless library from the PCs where's it currently stored
(currently a deskside and a laptop, on a home LAN).

I'm looking for suggestions/strategies for designing a home
multimedia storage solution that will be comfortably scalable over
the next 10+ years. Specifically, I'd like to be able to:

1. Add a SATA or IDE "big" drive (200+G) or 2 a year.
2. Implement automated back up of all the content to a redundant
drive subsystem. I would like to avoid backing up the content to
DVDs if I can, in part because I have vague concerns about the
compatibility over time of DVD+/-Rs and the
reliability/compatibility over time of DVD+/-RWs.

I currently generate most of my content using a 6MP DSLR and a
MiniDV camcorder. I anticipate moving to a 12+MP DSLR and a HDV
camcorder within a couple of years, greatly increasing the growth
rate of my storage needs.

I currently use only WinXP/NTFS but I can envision adding a Mac to
the LAN at some point, and I'm not opposed to rolling my own, say,
Linux server (although I'm concerned about the increased
maintainance efforts of a mixed-mode environment)

At the present time I use a 0.3 Tbyte server: it's pretty much a stock
Red Hat Linux system with a stack of disk drives configured as RAID 5.
Linux systems come with SAMBA, a server for Windows boxes. I keep all
live data on the server, never on the desktop box.

I use exchangeable disk drives for off-site storage; backing up the
whole array takes an hour or two.

I'm soon going to upgrade the whole thing to hot-swap SATA storage,
and this will increase capacity to 1.0 Tbyte. Should be OK for a
while. I'm also considering off-site daily backups over the internet.

Andrew.

From: "Andrew Haley"


|
| At the present time I use a 0.3 Tbyte server: it's pretty much a stock
| Red Hat Linux system with a stack of disk drives configured as RAID 5.
| Linux systems come with SAMBA, a server for Windows boxes. I keep all
| live data on the server, never on the desktop box.
|
| I use exchangeable disk drives for off-site storage; backing up the
| whole array takes an hour or two.
|
| I'm soon going to upgrade the whole thing to hot-swap SATA storage,
| and this will increase capacity to 1.0 Tbyte. Should be OK for a
| while. I'm also considering off-site daily backups over the internet.
|
| Andrew.

Are you kidding ?

Backup 1024 Gigabytes over the Internet ?

Even if you had a T3 have you considered how long this would take ?

Even 300MB would take a very long time.

--
Dave
http://www.claymania.com/removal-trojan-adware.html
http://www.ik-cs.com/got-a-virus.htm

"Andrew Haley" wrote in message
...

At the present time I use a 0.3 Tbyte server:

Oooh, wow, look, he said Tbyte. 300 GB wasn't 133t enough for you?

Greg

Bill wrote:
I estimate my digital content to be growing at about 100GB/yr. Blame it
on a growing collection of RAW, MP3, MPEG-2, and AVI files. As well as a
desire to host my own website.

I want to de-couple the storage and backup of this increasingly
priceless library from the PCs where's it currently stored (currently a
deskside and a laptop, on a home LAN).

I'm looking for suggestions/strategies for designing a home multimedia
storage solution that will be comfortably scalable over the next 10+
years. Specifically, I'd like to be able to:

1. Add a SATA or IDE "big" drive (200+G) or 2 a year.

I back-up onto an external USB 2.0/Firewire hard drive. A 250GB drive is
around $60, and the enclosure is $30 (USB 2.0) or $45 (USB 2.0/Firewire).

The redundancy thus far is that the pictures are also on the computer's
mirrored RAID drive. The Firewire enclosures can be daisy-chained, and I
do have two of them, but I haven't daisy-chained them as of yet.

The issue with doing a RAID1 solution is that you need to have the same
size drives. So you're committed to always replaceing drives in pairs,
but you probably want to do that anyway, and store the drives
separately. Also, I'm not sure about the compatibility between different
RAID controllers.

There are some devices that let you use external SATA or IDE hard drives
without the USB/Firewire conversion, though this limits your flexibility.

John A. Stovall wrote:
On Sun, 17 Jul 2005 04:35:09 -0700, Bill wrote:


I estimate my digital content to be growing at about 100GB/yr. Blame it
on a growing collection of RAW, MP3, MPEG-2, and AVI files. As well as a
desire to host my own website.

I want to de-couple the storage and backup of this increasingly
priceless library from the PCs where's it currently stored (currently a
deskside and a laptop, on a home LAN).

I'm looking for suggestions/strategies for designing a home multimedia
storage solution that will be comfortably scalable over the next 10+
years. Specifically, I'd like to be able to:

1. Add a SATA or IDE "big" drive (200+G) or 2 a year.
2. Implement automated back up of all the content to a redundant drive
subsystem. I would like to avoid backing up the content to DVDs if I
can, in part because I have vague concerns about the compatibility over
time of DVD+/-Rs and the reliability/compatibility over time of DVD+/-RWs.


Not unless it's a raid 5 system.

RAID 5 is not really appropriate for this application. You'd need to
archive your drives in sets of at least three. Then if you ever wanted
to retrieve the data from an archived set of RAID 5 drives, you'd need
to install all the drives back into the server.

RAID 1 (mirroring), is fine. Many newer motherboards have built in RAID
1 controllers. If you get a tower case such as the Antec SX1040
("http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=81046") you'll have
room for the mirrored drives in removeable bays (i.e.
"http://svc.com/mrk102fd-blk.html"), in addition to the regular system
drives.

David H. Lipman wrote:
From: "Andrew Haley"
|
| I'm soon going to upgrade the whole thing to hot-swap SATA
| storage, and this will increase capacity to 1.0 Tbyte. Should be
| OK for a while. I'm also considering off-site daily backups over
| the internet.

Are you kidding ?

Backup 1024 Gigabytes over the Internet ?

Sure, why not? It's only the incremental backups that need to go over
the net. Level 0 backups can still be done by sneakernet, and
sneakernet has huge bandwidth.

Andrew.

SMS wrote:
Bill wrote:
I estimate my digital content to be growing at about 100GB/yr. Blame it
on a growing collection of RAW, MP3, MPEG-2, and AVI files. As well as a
desire to host my own website.

I want to de-couple the storage and backup of this increasingly
priceless library from the PCs where's it currently stored (currently a
deskside and a laptop, on a home LAN).

I'm looking for suggestions/strategies for designing a home multimedia
storage solution that will be comfortably scalable over the next 10+
years. Specifically, I'd like to be able to:

1. Add a SATA or IDE "big" drive (200+G) or 2 a year.

I back-up onto an external USB 2.0/Firewire hard drive. A 250GB drive is
around $60, and the enclosure is $30 (USB 2.0) or $45 (USB 2.0/Firewire).

The redundancy thus far is that the pictures are also on the computer's
mirrored RAID drive. The Firewire enclosures can be daisy-chained, and I
do have two of them, but I haven't daisy-chained them as of yet.

The issue with doing a RAID1 solution is that you need to have the same
size drives.

No, that isn't true: the drives definitely don't have to be the same
size, but the partitions do.

Andrew.