The other day I read Mark Pilgrim’s look at the problems with backing up large amounts of data. Mark wrote,
But it’s not enough. I’m creating a lot of data, and I want to keep most of it for the rest of my life. This includes video of my children growing up, but also things like video footage of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In 2004, I generated 35 GB of such data. In 2005, I generated just shy of 150 GB. This year I’m on track to generate about 100 GB. I foresee doing this for about 20 more years, and then maintaining the archive for another 30 years after that. After that I’ll be dead and it will be Somebody Else’s Problem.
I don’t know how to back up 100 GB of video.
. . .
How do you back up 100 GB of data per year for 50 years? Or even 10 years?
I can sort of understand where Pilgrim is coming from, though at the moment I wish my backup problem was that simple. Currently I am generating about 150gb of data every week. How do you backup and manage 7.8 terabytes of data every year? Especially assuming that given the pace of things, that could be 15 terabytes/year within 5 years?
Looking at PriceWatch, a terabyte worth of SATA hard drives costs about $410. So 8 terabytes worth is just shy of $3,000 at the moment.
Currently the way I manage such large data is simply to archive it to DVD. Obviously that’s a temporary solution that I would not rely on for more than 2-3 years. Of course in 2-3 years, a) higher volume optical media (Blu-Ray/HD-DVD) should be cheaper, allowing me to cut down on the thousands of DVDs I’m currently storing, and b) the cost per terabyte of HD space will eventually fall below the current cost per terabyte of optical storage (DVD storage costs roughly $69/terabyte for the physical media).