obviously there are many questions regarding data archiving, but I would like to ask your opinion on given scenario regarding selecting proper method:
- Company has an "archive" of mission critical data around the size of 1.5 TB and growing (the rate is increasing as data get bigger) stored on an RAID6 array (which blew in their face once already due to faulty controller, RAID isn't the answer to everything, right..)
- They need to backup that archive, preferably offsite, as they really cannot afford to loose it
- Cloud etc. is out of the question, due to narrow bandwidth (about 512Kpbs uplink)
- Linux based servers only
So my question is this: would you select tape or hard drive based archiving solution? Disks are cheaper, but their handling seems to be more of an hassle and I'm used to thinking that once you store a tape, you can be pretty sure that you're getting your data back. At least more so than from harddrive, even though it's disconnected and stored somewhere in a locker.
The retention rate for a dataset is not that high, a year back would suffice, provided we create one snapshot once a month (not sure whether to archive it all over again every single time, or use incrementals).
to clarify the kind of data i am talking about:
- they (the company) are a publishing house with their own DTP department
- there are no legislation related issues regarding long term data storage, no standards to comply to and so forth
- they store large images, and prepared PDF and InDesign (or whatever) files ready for production print
- time to recovery is not an critical issue. Should the total disaster happen, it wouldn't be a problem to wait for recovery hours/days, as the storage in question is not usually used as a working environment for daily use
- they tried blu-ray, but sinnce the data passed certain amount, it just wasn't feasible any-more (two backup sets of the whole archive would be worth about $1000 in media costs alone)
- annual data growth is somewhere between 0.5 to 1TB of data, depending on the work they do, obviously