Back up 5D footage

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Daniel Browning

Yes, and that would work great if 200 GB/tape is sufficient. For 2TB backed up in triplicate, that takes 30 tapes, compared to just three $99 hard drives. Personally, I have 6 TB backed up in triplicate, and I don't consider that to be a lot.

Used tapes can be found for less than $10 delivered but I can see that I am not going to convince you of the merits of tape:-) One of the biggest arguments in favour of tapes is their long shelf life & one of the biggest arguments against is speed compared to disks. Tapes are also nicer for backing up on a per project basis as 200GB would amount to about 10 hours of video from a Canon DSLR which is far more than we would have for a typical project but I would be reluctant to use just one hard disk per project as it would be more expensive & bulky.

[Dave Partington]

Originally Posted by Daniel Browning

Well, I wont comment on the reliability aspect, but I will say something about the cost. Every time I've looked into tape backup, it came out much more expensive.

HP LTO4 800 GB backup drive and SAS card: $2,400
20 tapes (16 TB): $600
=====
$3,000

That's $188/TB, over three times as much as 2TB hard drives:
External e-sata hard drive docking station: $30
Eight 2TB drives ($100/each at the time of this writing): $800
====
$830

The less tapes you use, the more lopsided the comparison:

HP LTO4 800 GB backup drive and SAS card: $2,400
7 tapes (5.6 TB): $175
=====
$2,575

That's $460/TB, while the 6TB of hard drives is only $55/TB, so in that scenario it's 8 times cheaper. The tape drive would have to be $155 in order to match the cost of hard drives for 6 TB of backup (2 TB in triplicate). But even the cheapest ones are ten times that amount.

If all you ever need is 16TB then tape is not for you. I have much more than 16TB and it's growing rapidly. HDDs are simply not cost effective once you get in to large amounts of footage.

Also, recalculate for more than one backup, maybe three. So 16TBx3 = 48TB. Now imagine 64TBx3 = 192TB. Hard Disks = $10,560

The Tape solution (using your numbers) = $2,400 + $7,200 = $9,600.

Now imagine 150TB or 300TB backup up x3.

If you don't shoot much, or don't need to retain footage for more than the length of the project then tape is probably not for you. If you need to archive footage for future reference then tape is a viable and possible cheaper solution than hard disks.

Imagine broadcasters than need to store petabytes of footage. Do you imagine they have lots of hard disks sat on a shelf? ;)