The answer depends a lot on what you mean by "long-term storage". Do you
want the data to be available all the time on a mountable volume? Or is
putting it away on a shelf OK? Do you want the storage to be as
bulletproof and worry-free as possible? Or are you OK with the fate of
your data being somewhat nebulous, like in "the cloud"? The price
points for all these things are very different.
You can now buy a single 8 TB drive for $230 USD. LTO6 tapes are
currently at ~7 USD/TB. Both of these are the current lowest price/TB
for disk and tape. Using the media, of course, generally requires
attaching it to a server that costs ~$5k-$10k USD. Amazon Glacier is
free for uploads and essentially free for downloading it back as long as
you don't want more than 1 GB per month. The other extreme is a NetApp,
where you just want a turnkey system that keeps your data as safe as
possible, but is also really fast.
What do I do? I am currently deploying a RAID6 array of 8 TB drives for
high-performance storage. For archiving I used to use DVD-R, but that
can't keep up with a Pilatus, so now I'm on LTO6 tapes for off-line
backups. I know tapes are famous as "write-only media", but so far over
the last 10 years I haven't had any real trouble reading back an old LTO
tape. <touch wood>
-James Holton
MAD Scientist
On 11/29/2018 12:54 PM, Lieberman, Raquel L wrote:
Dear All,
How do your labs handle long-term raw data backups? My lab is maxing
out our 6TB RAID backup (with two off-site mirrors) so I am
investigating our next long term solution. The vast majority of the
data sets are published structures (i.e. processed data deposited in
PDB) or redundant/unusable so immediate access is not anticipated, but
the size of data sets is increasing quickly with time, so I am looking
for a scalable-yet-affordable solution.
Would be grateful for input into various options, e.g. bigger
HD/RAIDs, cloud backup, tape, anything else.
I will compile.
Thank you,
Raquel
------
Raquel L. Lieberman, Ph.D.
Professor
School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Georgia Institute of Technology
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