So I run a video production company. We have 300TB of archived projects (and growing daily).
Many years ago, our old solution for archiving was simply to dump old projects off onto an external drive, duplicate that, and have one drive at the office, one offsite elsewhere. This was ok, but not ideal. Relatively expensive per TB, and just a shit ton of physical drives.
A few years ago, we had an unlimited Google Drive and 1000/1000 fibre internet. So we moved to a system where we would drop a project onto an external drive, keep that offsite, and have a duplicate of it uploaded to Google Drive. This worked ok until we reached a hidden file number limit on Google Drive. Then they removed the unlimited sizing of Google Drive accounts completely. So that was a dead end.
So then we moved that system to Dropbox a couple of years ago, as they were offering an unlimited account. This was the perfect situation. Dropbox was feature rich, fast, integrated beautifully into finder/explorer and just a great solution all round. It meant it was easy to give clients access to old data directly if they needed, etc. Anyway, as you all know, that gravy train has come to an end recently, and we now have 12 months grace with out storage on there before we have to have this sorted back to another sytem.
Our options seem to be:
- Go back to our old system of duplicated external drives, with one living offsite. We’d need ~$7500AUD worth of new drives to duplicate what we currently have.
- Buy a couple of LTO-9 tape drives (2 offices in different cities) and keep one copy on an external drive and one copy on a tape archive. This would be ~$20000AUD of hardware upfront + media costs of ~$2000AUD (assuming we’d get maybe 30TB per tape on the 18TB raw LTO 9 tapes). So more expensive upfront but would maybe pay off eventually?
- Build a linustechtips style beast of a NAS. Raw drive cost would be similar to the external drives, but would have the advantage of being accessible remotely. Would then need to spend $5000-10000AUD on the actual hardware on top of the drives. Also have the problem of ever growing storage needs. This solution we could potentially not duplicate the data to external drives though and live with RAID as only form of redundancy…
- Another clour storage service? Anything fast and decent enough that comes at a reasonable cost?
Any advice here would be appreciated!
AWS Glacier Deep Freeze is designed for this. Something you access a couple of times per year if that, and it’s $.99/TB/mo. Price that out compared to a $10k NAS or tape backup that will still need consumables like drives and tapes, and it might be your best option. There are costs on retrieval, but since as you’ve said this is archive footage that customers might request you could pass that cost down to them.
Tip: AWS Snowcone & AWS Snowball are less expensive for data-out when you need to move many TiB. There is no time-limit on how long they can be rented.
NAS.
Over the last 24 months I’ve built 300TB (a mix of 10 and 14TB disks) for $2500 in disks. I could do that right now for $2100. A 18TB LTO9 tape is more expensive than what I’m paying per TB for 14TB disks.
$700 in hardware to build the NAS with 25 bays.
Glacier would cost you $1080/mo in storage fees alone (300,000GB @ $0.0036) not including the $0.09/GB to get any data back out. Deep Glacier is less (by half, for storage), but comes with strings attached.
Don’t forget to factor in labor hours of what it’s going to cost you to maintain a tape library or a local server in general.
Are you charging clients for long term storage after a project is complete? If not, you should be.
Have you considered Amazon S3? It’s made for enterprises with unlimited storage, a lot of pricing options and could save you a lot of headaches long term.
Backblaze B2 is cheaper by a long way.
Yeah we looked into it. But as subven1 pointed out, it’s a brutal monthly cost.
s3 is designed with high availability and high throughput in mind, op needs a cold storage solution like aws glacier or azure cold storage. but even that is not cheap
You have 3 issues, online archive of past projects, long term (offline) storage & client access.
LTO is your long term solution for offline archive of projects. Depending on the average / largest project you might want to do 1 project per tape so LTO7/8 sizes. Scales really well, multiple copies, etc.
For the online storage, a NAS is really the only option. How it’s sized & configured comes into play. You can go cheaper with used enterprise gear, but then you’re dealing with more disks & higher power bills. Fewer larger disks can help with the power bill & noise levels.
Splitting things between a read-only share (of things that have been archived to tape), and a normal working share would help on the workflow.
The catch is what you do for client data exchanges. Giving them access via Dropbox is nice, but you need better housekeeping around data. Once the 1 year grace is over, what’s the size they have committed to? While self-hosting a client accessible share is possible, there’s ongoing costs & I would be cautious around exposing the NAS to the internet directly.
If you need fast and regular access to the archive, anything up to 1 PB can be handled with HDDs nowadays. If you dont need that, LTO tape will be much cheaper. For your offsite backup encryption+archival storage such as GCP coldline or archival storage is very cost effective and can be combined with either. Think about your data and organization. Perhaps you only need fast access to a part of the data, so combining the two might be the best solution. Consider if you have an IT department or a data steward to set up a system for organizing that data.
I hope you charge your clients for archiving purpose. I work in a similar field as yours and no chance I’m archiving this much data if the clients aren’t paying for this. I have a contract that stipulates assets are kept for 1 year then they pay a yearly fee for archiving or they agree that we may delete it.
I have 400TB stored in our Wasabi archive and we use a Purestorage nas for live data. In your case I would look at a Synology.
I work for a US VFX company. We mostly use tapes - they’re fine as long as you don’t need to pull data off them. Most of ours were backed up with Veeam which is in the process of screwing over all tape customers now. New backups are being done with Archiware. We’ve also started using AWS Deep Glacier which is roughly $1 per TB a month without egress. This is for any archives. If people are still working on stuff here and there, we use storinators to host that data. Hot tier is all flash.
Make sure Enterprises use Enterprise setups, else you’ll end up with data loss. Personal or homelabs are whatever but ensure you’re setup correctly for anything business related.
Copy 1, long term storage: LTO / LTFS is the way to go for one of your copies, it is by far the most reliable storage solution.
Copy 2, a big ass Truenas build, they can be done at the cost of the hard drives and can be configured for very high availability with 3 parity drives. Pro tip, have spare drives in the chassis but not configured as hot spares, it’s a long story, you will learn if you go down the path of truenas. Get a used chassis for the drives and hook it up with a SAS adapter.
Copy 3, if you have important data, you will need a 3rd copy, and that should be LTO as well.If you want more details, feel free to msg me
This is a bit out there, but have you considered encrypting it & putting it in the Filecoin network? According to a network explorer, they’ve got ~24EiB of space online currently.
Apparently, alot of the time storing is done for free because the miners need valid data to store to qualify for network rewards.
In any case, DeStor has a contact form that it looks like ought to get you a quote.
RAID is not a backup! A single raid array in a single server is still only one copy and one very big single point of failure.
Back blaze B2, or Wasabi seem to be a lot cheaper than going AWS S3 I’ve checked with wasabi a while ago and there are no fees for downloading/uploading. $6/TB/month
NAS
NAS is not a backup.
It can be if you really want it to be and don’t care about not using most of the functionalities of a NAS.
Just need more than one then.
Or two. Or use a cloud backup option on your NAS
IMO it depends on how organized you are and how often you need to access archived video.
LTO-9 is cheaper per TB (haven’t run the numbers, but on the order of 100s of TB it’s almost definitely true) but relies on someone physically finding the right tape and putting it into the system (unless you shell out for a very expensive automated system). Not good for fast access, but cheaper for expanding.
If you need fast, automated access I’d recommend the NAS option, but keep in mind that it would be in one physical location. A fire or flood and you’re fucked.
Plus, since the cost per TB of tape is so much cheaper than HDD, expanding your archive is probably much cheaper with tape (keeping in mind the organization/automation aspect)
Try AWS Amazon S3 glacier service. If you’re talking about work data that generate income, you probably should go for a professional storage solution.
Agreed. But we’re a relatively small business, so need a balanced cost. AWS is ~$10,000AUD/month for what we’re after from memory.
AWS as well as Azure provide cold storage on the order of $1/TB/mo. There are caveats, such as retrieval costs and such, but depending on your situation that might be OK.
Especially the retrieval and especially if you want it fast
AWS is ~$10,000AUD/month
Was that for Glacier?
Or just regular S3 / something else?
I use this for a client - they have an on site server, which backs up to Azure Archive Tier storage. They have around 60TB up there and pay just under $100 per month.
Message me if you like and I’ll go into exactly what we did, but it works well for them!
Until you need to actually restore a project consisting of multiple TB and it would have been cheaper to get a local backup server.
You’re right, cheaper. But I don’t know if it’s safer.