I have been doing GPS since 1986, and surveying since 1980.?ÿ
When I first started GPS, a 10 MB hard drive as $1000. So we backed data up on floppies. For a while, we were using VHS tapes, but that didn't really work out well. Then back to floppies. Of course, we weren't talking about a lot of data, GPS only, 15s epochs, no digital cameras yet, no scanners. I tried tape drives, but lost some data with those. Finally settled on CD's at the company I was working for.?ÿ
When I started my company in 1997, I started backing data up onto CD's (600MB), then later on to DVD's (4 GB). That went on until 2014 or so. I had always heard or read that CD's and DVD's would last for a very long time. Since 2015, I have been backing up to hard drives (NAS). I have a 4 bay drive on the network that has 32 TB of storage. I have all of my data (except scan jobs) on one drive, and a second drive mirrors that. All scan data is on a separate drive.?ÿ
So we were slow recently, and I decided to copy all of the CD's and DVD's over to the hard drive. Some of the CD's/DVD's had files near the end that were not recoverable. One DVD is completely unreadable, won't even give me a directory. Disturbing.?ÿ
I am not naive enough to think that these hard drives are a permanent solution either. Of course, I am in my early 60's, so not a long time to go, but maybe someone will want the data someday...
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What are others doing for long term storage??
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What are others doing for long term storage??
I back up to a hard drive locally, but also to Amazon using JungleDisk.?ÿ I have about 800GB that gets backed up daily.
I have an external hard drive (~ 1 TB) on my desk that is sync??d with Dropbox on-line in real time. ?ÿAlthough, sometimes I have to pause and restart the sync when I am looking for files through the Dropbox app on my phone that I know are on my pc, six feet away, over there out of this La-Z-Boy chair.
Two servers backing up each night and sent to a cloud storage. We've had two major issues, one hard drive failure, that was a big cost and one ransom attack last year. The ransom attack was also expensive but we were able to save everything. Our older server recently was acting up so it got replaced.
For the first 8 or 10 years I did as you John, I stored completed projects on CD/DVD.?ÿ At some point prior to that I started storing stuff on an external drive as well as the disks.?ÿ Fortunately I copied all of the CD/DVDs to the server.?ÿ I'm kind of fortunate that my house is a whopping 60 feet or so from my office so I installed a conduit and ran cat6 cable between the two.?ÿ I then started backing up to an NAS at the house.?ÿ That was before the days of west cost cities becoming engulfed in wildfire.?ÿ Given that new reality and the fact the whole ransomware thing, I started daily backups iDrive.?ÿ As for my network, I originally set up a RAID 10 which greatly increased network read/write times while still protecting it from an individual drive failure.?ÿ Over the years I have had to replace several mechanical HDs.?ÿ I have since switched over to NVM express M.2 drives and given their speed and durability I've axed the RAID.
I should add that I have a full backup of my PC once a week and an incremental backup every night to a local hard external drive. So anything I am currently working on is safe, as is my current PC configuration, etc.?ÿ
But what I was describing above and asking about permanency was archiving after projects are done.?ÿ
I wonder how "permanent" the cloud backups are, say iDrive or Amazon, etc. Since they have racks and racks of hard drives, what happens when one goes bad? I assume they use RAID.?ÿ
Unfortunately I started my NAS with just a single 8 TB drive, and from what I have read if I want to set it up as a RAID it has to be done from the beginning, you can't just start now that I have 5 TB on it. But I am not 100% clear on that. So for now I just occasionally update the second drive from the first.?ÿ ?ÿ
Unfortunately raid need to be set up from the beginning.?ÿ In most systems you can add additional drive to an existing RAID.?ÿ Depending on you NAS setup you could populate your empty drive bays setting up creating RAID system with them.?ÿ Then transfer the data off of you single HD to the RAID.?ÿ From there you should be able to add your old drive into the RAID thus increasing its capacity.?ÿ One thing to remember is that while you can use drives of different sizes, they RAID will treat them all as the smallest drive in the system.?ÿ Some of the RAID schemes allow for data redundancy even if the total storage of the disks is less than double the available storage.
