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How do you archive work?

steveash

steveash

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 7, 2008
527
245
UK
I'm interested in how other people archive old work. I currently have my own system but was wondering if there is a better way of doing things.

I am a one man business but use freelancers fairly regularly. My system is to write old projects to DVD which I keep off site (currently a collection of about 50). Each of these 4.7GB folders are also written to an external hard drive which I keep on my desk. I've learn't from experience to have 2 copies of everything. I am finding that files are getting bigger and whereas a few years back I wrote a DVD every 2 or 3 months it is now getting more regular. to help me find what I need I use CDFinder software to catalogue these archives.
 
Blueray prices have dropped considerably, so you might look into investing in a burner and going that route. Or, you could do what I'm doing and buy a Voyager Q drive and cheaper OEM disks to archive. I use the Voyager on eSATA, but it also has a FW800 connection. I usually run all of my projects off a bare drive plugged into the Voyager, then archive to another drive once the project is done. I don't worry as much about drive failure because the drive sits on a shelf unless I need to pull something off it, or write more project to it (until it's full, then it gets retired and put away).

But, I'm looking at Blueray now for permanent backups. Last I looked, it was around 7 cents a gig for the blue-ray media. External burners are around $150+

If you go the harddrive/voyager route, you are looking at around 5 cents per gig for storage, but you'll have faster access speeds and the ability to rewrite the drive if you decide to no longer save the archive. I think a decent backup solution would be a combination of both.
 
I do it pretty much the same way... the unarchived projects on my system are backed up to external, but archives get put onto duplicate DVDs, scanned into the dvd database, and one goes offsite. Redundant backup is good but if one of those backups is not offsite you're not truly protected.
 
steveash said:
I'm interested in how other people archive old work. I currently have my own system but was wondering if there is a better way of doing things.

I am a one man business but use freelancers fairly regularly. My system is to write old projects to DVD which I keep off site (currently a collection of about 50). Each of these 4.7GB folders are also written to an external hard drive which I keep on my desk. I've learn't from experience to have 2 copies of everything. I am finding that files are getting bigger and whereas a few years back I wrote a DVD every 2 or 3 months it is now getting more regular. to help me find what I need I use CDFinder software to catalogue these archives.
Click to expand...

This is how Chase Jarvis does it.
 
Unless you want to store absolutely everything indefinitely step one is figuring out what "retention period" you want for your backups. That will determine whether you backup to optical media (good for about 5 years) or tape (not sure the limits on tape are).

Besides the price per-gig, using HDDs for storage is easier to recycle than burning optical media (or tape). Having a set of 2 - 7 disks that you backup to in order (either using time machine or anything that does rsync) can go a long way depending on how much data you produce a day vs how much retention you need.

The main disadvantage of Hard drives to say tape is the failure rate. So each set of disks would need to be raided (either raid 1 or raid 6).

I think based on budget et al you can scale that pretty well for the long term - multiple years down the road.
 
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