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Terabytes??


markgoodrich

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I see I can buy a 1 or even 2-terabyte (1000 gigabytes, or a trillion bytes) external hard drive for about a hunnerd bucks. Great. That's really cool.

 

Uh, who, exactly HAS a terabyte of information they want to keep?

 

In a related development, Amazon has "moved supercomputing to the cloud," apparently giving anyone willing to pay access to supercomputing speed. Surely this can be used to do a statistical analysis predicting individual FD failures.

Here: http://tinyurl.com/28lpjtb

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russell_bynum

"Uh, who, exactly HAS a terabyte of information they want to keep?"

 

We're not too far from that at our house. Digital pics since 1998. Videos (stuff we took as well as stuff we downloaded legally). DVD movies that we ripped and converted for iPhone, etc. MP3 music library (all of our CD's have been ripped to high-quality MP3's, plus all of the stuff that we've bought from iTunes). etc.

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If you start storing video you can get a terabyte easily. I have all the seasons of Top Gear and a bunch of other stuff stored on my computer, and a bunch of last season's WSBK racing on the auxilary hard drive for my DVR. Both of those drives are a terabyte and they're both about 3/4/ full.

 

A combination of HD media and sloppy programming will eat up hard drive space in a hurry. No slam on anyone currently programming, I'm just old enough to remember when mainframes used proprietary programs to accomplish tasks. It often took someone who understood both the hardware and the software to get something to run correctly, and there were some really elegant solutions as a result.

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Ive been considering this issue of deciding if it is better to store my stuff on two or more backup drives or pay an annual fee for cloud computing storage. What happens if you rely on cloud storage and the company goes out of business. What if you just use your own external drives and they break. Im going to try to see what the best options are.

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russell_bynum
Ive been considering this issue of deciding if it is better to store my stuff on two or more backup drives or pay an annual fee for cloud computing storage. What happens if you rely on cloud storage and the company goes out of business. What if you just use your own external drives and they break. Im going to try to see what the best options are.

 

I like Cloud for backup and local disks for "live" storage.

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Ok, I think Ill use both cloud and ext HD. One cloud company I found is carbonite.com. They seem pretty good. 59 bucks a year, unlimited storage but their max upload speed is 5 gigs a day so it will take about 6 months for them to get all my stuff.

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russell_bynum
Ok, I think Ill use both cloud and ext HD. One cloud company I found is carbonite.com. They seem pretty good. 59 bucks a year, unlimited storage but their max upload speed is 5 gigs a day so it will take about 6 months for them to get all my stuff.

 

I'm using Mozy (owned by EMC). It's $5/month and I'm not aware of a daily upload quota. I know for sure that it didn't take 6 months for my first backup set to upload. A few days, yes, but not 6 months.

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I see...has never occurred to me to keep commercial videos. I can see how that would fill up a trillion bytes in a flash.

 

I worry about digital photos, but then I think about the shelves of photo albums we have, which we look at, well, never. I even have one of those digital picture frames, and haven't ever gotten around to loading it up with lots of stuff...now that I have my photos accessible, mebbe I'll do that. Nah. Prolly just go ride.

 

Thanks, once again, for all the helpful suggestions with the drive, and the good ideas about cloud backup. I'm surprised Amazon doesn't offer that sort of thing.

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My Mac Pro at home has 4 hard drive bays. I filled each bay with 1 TB drives considering that they just aren't very expensive. Like Russell, I have a lot of iTunes content (movies, TV, music, etc.) which takes up a lot of space. I also have a huge Aperture photo library (30k + images at high rez), plus my Mac serves as a home project studio, so I have years of self-recorded audio.

 

Not sure why, but I am not comfortable with the idea of backing up to a cloud. Sounds too nebulous (haha). Instead, I have the first two drives in a striped RAID configuration and the 2nd pair of drives mirrors the first pair. Not perfect, but there's very little chance I'm going lose everything unless I physically lose the computer. Now that I think about it, maybe a cloud is not a bad idea.

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.Thanks, once again, for all the helpful suggestions with the drive, and the good ideas about cloud backup. I'm surprised Amazon doesn't offer that sort of thing.
They do, it's called S3 and I've been using it for a few years. It was one of the first cloud storage options publicly available and you need 3rd party software to access it so it's probably not the best option starting out now. I'm actually transitioning to Google Documents which costs a lot less than Amazon S3.

 

A cloud company going out of business almost certainly wouldn't create a problem for the users, the data would still exist and the customer list would be a valuable asset for another cloud company.

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.Thanks, once again, for all the helpful suggestions with the drive, and the good ideas about cloud backup. I'm surprised Amazon doesn't offer that sort of thing.
They do, it's called S3 and I've been using it for a few years. It was one of the first cloud storage options publicly available and you need 3rd party software to access it so it's probably not the best option starting out now. I'm actually transitioning to Google Documents which costs a lot less than Amazon S3.

 

A cloud company going out of business almost certainly wouldn't create a problem for the users, the data would still exist and the customer list would be a valuable asset for another cloud company.

 

I like the Google Docs idea; I just back up photos, mainly; I assume I can limit access when I begin fiddling with it; wonder if it puts them into Picasa? That would be nice, an easy organizing system.

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We recently acquired a new machine that came with a 750Gb hard drive and promtly added a 1Tb external hard drive to store important documents and pictures on so it is easy to plug-unplug to keep it separated and safe from viruses when not in use. We also kept the hard drives from a couple of other machines and added a hard drive docking station to plug those into as additional external storage. All total now, with internal and external memory we have about 2.5Tb total space and none of it was very expensive. Take a look at Newegg.com, that's where we got our 1Tb for about $75.00

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I have an external terabyte Seagate drive for backing up all our photos, iPod music, and system clone backups. It's almost filled up. I've got 500 GB on my notebook, 160 GB on another external, and 1.75 TB on my new desktop totaling over 3 TB of storage space. It'll all eventually be filled. It's inevitable.

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russell_bynum

Not sure why, but I am not comfortable with the idea of backing up to a cloud. Sounds too nebulous (haha). Instead, I have the first two drives in a striped RAID configuration and the 2nd pair of drives mirrors the first pair. Not perfect, but there's very little chance I'm going lose everything unless I physically lose the computer. Now that I think about it, maybe a cloud is not a bad idea.

 

A good power spike could wipe out your whole computer. Not to mention stuff like fire, a pipe bursts and everything gets wet, or your computer is stolen. And the most common way to screw yourself with that kind of backup...accidentally delete something and your RAID controller will happily replicate the delete to the whole array.

 

RAID is good, and I'm a big fan. But RAID ain't the same thing as a backup.

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Francois_Dumas

You wonder who has 1 Tb of data?

 

We wondered who in the world would fill up our 6 new 3340 hard disk units at the news paper back in 1976. They EACH had 30 MEGAbytes of storage, so we had a grand total of 180 MB added to the mainframe in one giant purchase !

 

Only a few years later the Personal IBM Computers came with a 20 Mb hard disk instead of the 10 Mb we had been buying before. THAT would certainly not get filled within the next 3 or 4 years !!??

 

Today I have a home office and have a number of 500 and 600 Mb disks in 6 computers PLUS some SIX 1 or 1.5 Tb disks attached to them for backup and 'take-along' storage.

 

I am sure I'll be buying new storage next year.

 

Our 'needs' evolve with the 'technical possibilities'. That has always been the case and will remain so ;)

 

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Survived-til-now

It's true that power spikes, theft etc could wipeout local storage but when you use remote storage offered by commercial suppliers have you stopped to think whether it really is secure? If you discount dishonest commercial sale of your private data then you cannot discount hackers or even legitimised government spying on its citizens.......

 

The most reliable form of back-up is your own external hard drive (and its difficult to buy one for less than a Terrabyte), plug it in weekly and run the back-up, unplug - and if you are worried about theft, lock it away somewhere secure.

 

I renewed my security software only to discover that the parental controls local drive add-on is to be removed amd the only option will be to join their on-line family protection, where every keystroke of my kids (and me!) will be held safely and securely, monitoring every site we visit - yea right! If you think your on-line storage is only going to be seen by you - think on....

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russell_bynum
It's true that power spikes, theft etc could wipeout local storage but when you use remote storage offered by commercial suppliers have you stopped to think whether it really is secure? If you discount dishonest commercial sale of your private data then you cannot discount hackers or even legitimised government spying on its citizens.......

 

I don't have much data that's confidential or that I would worry much if someone got it. The sensitive data that I do have is encrypted using TrueCrypt. Nothing's perfect, of course, but there's easier ways to get my data than by breaking into my backup account (which, btw, stores the data encrypted) and then finding my encrypted files, recognizing that they're encrypted files rather than what they seem to be, grabbing those files, and then figuring out how to decrypt them. so I don't really worry that much.

 

The majority of our data is pictures, videos, and music...and if someone steals that stuff it's not the end of the world.

 

The most reliable form of back-up is your own external hard drive (and its difficult to buy one for less than a Terrabyte), plug it in weekly and run the back-up, unplug - and if you are worried about theft, lock it away somewhere secure.

 

For that system to work, you have to remember to do it...which most people will not. You can get backup software that will run automagically and back up your stuff to your external drive, but that means you've got all of your data backed up onsite. Are you going to remember to rotate it offsite?

 

It's a perfectly viable backup solution, but it's very labor-intensive and relies on your to remember to do something in order for it to work properly.

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Uh, who, exactly HAS a terabyte of information they want to keep?

 

I've got about 1.5 TB of archived data that is actively backed up and I keep multiple copies of it - 2 at home (1 active, one not plugged in) and one away from home. There is no way in hell I'm ripping 3000 CDs to lossless again, so I damn well refuse to lose the library. That's a little more than half. Another big chunk is photos. I've also got an archive of all my emails that goes back to 1994, though I don't keep triple copies of that because it is huge and not quite so tragic if lost. And that's just my archival storage.

 

Then there is the live backup of my current work machine. My laptop has a 500GB drive, with about 180GB in use. I take incremental backups that are non-destructive via apple's time machine, so I don't just have every file, I have every file in each state that it has ever been backed up in, so that's about 400GB right now. Needless to say, that's another 1TB drive. I've probably got at least 6TB of storage in use right now with another 4TB of free space, plus another 2TB at my folks' place. I also rotate old drives out at pretty regular intervals. I replace at least 2TB every year for the last couple of years, which keeps the total number of drives down as I replace with higher capacity drives and lowers the likelihood of a drive failure. A couple hundred bucks per year is a small price to pay for data integrity. Interestingly, my collection of data has grown at such a pace that it has cost me a couple of hundred bucks a year for many, many years. My storage requirements seem to grow at about the same rate that price per gigabyte drops.

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Not sure why, but I am not comfortable with the idea of backing up to a cloud.

 

Is there any cloud storage solution that isn't cost prohibitive when storing data on the terabyte scale? I can use smugmug to store my photos for a flat rate. But amazon S3 costs $0.093 per GB per month plus data transfer costs of $0.10 per GB. That's $102 in transfer costs plus $95 per month in storage costs. For a single terabyte. You could buy a couple of drives per month for that. While I'm sure that S3 is far from that most cost effective solution is there anyone offering cloud storage for at least 10x cheaper than S3? Seems unlikely. And even at $10/month, there's considerable inconvenience in having your data available only over a slow WAN connection instead of directly attached.

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I have a 2TB drive (two 1TB drives) configured into a RAID 1 setup with almost 900GB used up on it. I have 400Gb of video, mostly DVD rips (on DVD's I own) and some home video plus backup images of my entire computer. The biggest loss I wold have is my 10 years of digital photos - they are not replaceable. The RAID setup essentially creates a duplicate of one of the 1TB drives onto the other in case one fails. I back up my computer every Saturday night at 2AM - automatically. Those disk images take up almost 500GB at this time. I can delete the older ones if i need more space but I also have another 500GB drive for misc storage. I also have a duplicate set of photos on my office computer that I try to update periodically.

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Uh, who, exactly HAS a terabyte of information they want to keep?
Somebody does - Amazon announced this morning that their cloud storage (S3) can now accomodate single objects as big as 5 terabytes!
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Uh, who, exactly HAS a terabyte of information they want to keep?
Somebody does - Amazon announced this morning that their cloud storage (S3) can now accomodate single objects as big as 5 terabytes!

 

Linked to their new offering of "supercomputer" cloud for a fee to anyone??

 

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Uh, who, exactly HAS a terabyte of information they want to keep?

 

Um, that would be my work, day in and day out... Graphic Designer with a boat load of complex Photoshop builds, InDesign files, Illustrator files on our Mac OS X Server. Over 2 terabytes of daily work on it ready and willing.

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russell_bynum
Good point.

 

They may be right, but Google has a long history of grossly overestimating the importance of their products.

 

Remember how Wave was going to change everything?

 

 

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Glad I took the advice here...although only have a few gigglebites on my new 2TB external drive, having backed up all three computers...began getting the Blue Screen on my main laptop two days ago, ran diagnostics on it, and hard drive is failing.

 

The drive I bought makes an exact replica of the hard drive, so I can, according to the maker, simply install a new hard drive and run the replica software, and it will...replicate...my old setup with the new drive. Drive arrives tomorrow, fingers crossed....

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