Hi there,

I am a composer, I write music for film and television and I compose and produce all my work on my computer.

Once I am done with a project, I need to archive it and store it somewhere.  These projects can be very large. I currently have about 200 GB of projects that I would like to archive somewhere and keep them safe. I would be happy to have them just reside on one of my internal drives as storage is so cheap these days but it would also be nice not to have those projects take up all that space on my Time Machine drive also. Yes, I could exclude them from TM backups but then, I like to have the data in at least two places.

Any thoughts on what I should do?

I currently use Crashplan in addition to TM to backup projects that I am currently working on but it would be nice to be able to store completed projects (like a whole TV series I’ve scored)  somewhere safe for eternity. Any suggestions? Tape backups? Not sure where to go or how affordable that is.

Best regards,

Felix

I’d go with external portable drives.  You can get 500GB 2.5” drives in a variety of cases, from USB to Firewire to eSata, for under $100.  Easy to hook up, backup, and transport. Portability gives you the important option of storing archive backups off site. Our lead tech has the saying if your data isn’t backed up off site, it isn’t really backed up. For a bit over a hundred bucks, you could have two backups: one kept locally for easy access if needed, and another stored in a safe deposit box or something in case of disaster to your work site.

Hi there Zewazir,

Well, I think that would be the cheapest option, you are right.

One thing that I am weary about is the fact that every 6 months or so according to our trusty podcast guru’s you need to power up hard drives as the earth’s magnetic field starts to re-align / damage the data on hard drives.

Would an optical storage solution be smarter I wonder?

Anyone care to shed any light on that?

Felix

Felix:

You did not say how big one project is. Based on your description, you are saying ALL of your projects are about 200 Gb. If a project is below the size of a DVD, why not store a project on their own DVD? Does your Mac have a Dual Layer drive? That will give you a bit more than 7Gb of space.

Another alternative is Blu-Ray. If you buy a dual layer Blu-Ray drive, you can fit around 50Gb on a single disk. At the moment, I would avoid multi-layered drives (more than dual layered). I know someone using a multi-layered drive on a PC and have had problems reading disks he burned on the drive! If you want to really be “future proof” for the near future, you may want to stick with a single layered Blu-Ray disk.

You should be able to buy a decent Blu-Ray burner/player for about $175. You can buy 25Gb disks for an average of $4 each (in pages of 10-25) and $6-8 for 50Gb disks.

I hope that helps!!

Hi there Smileys,
Thanks for your suggestion. I think that is a good solution and probably the most practical and affordable in the long run. Sorry, i should have mentioned how big each project is, they are normally around 25+ gb but can be any size really. Very good advice about being weary of the double layered disks.

Using blu ray discs i can send backups back home and keep one locally. Dvd’s would be too small and it would become a very tedious project.
Thank you all very much for your suggestions, i very much appreciate it.

Best regards,
Felix