On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 3:07 PM, Joseph Heaton <[email protected]> wrote: > ... of running out of drive space.
Well, 10 GB/month, 50 years, 10 * 12 * 50 = 6000 GB (plus the 300 GB you have now). You can buy 6 TB for, what, $300 these days? ;-) Seriously, that's not a lot of storage, even at current SAN prices. And it's only going to get cheaper. 50 years from now that will prolly fit on a $2 flash drive (or whatever the equivalent is then). My first thought is to keep it all online (with regular read verifications, if your storage doesn't do that already) and be done with it. > There are to be further discussions, with questions asked about access: how >often, how quickly do they need it, etc. How often they need access is really the important one. A cave in Nevada is cheap, but access time stinks. > ... archive the rest to DVDs ... If you do go with offline archiving, I would store the data redundantly, and at different times. For example, burn a few copies now. Then in 5 years, burn another set of copies, and check the first set. Only then remove the originals from online storage. Then check all copies every year or so. Multiple copies at once means a single element failure doesn't kill you. Multiple generations means if the DVDs start to die after X years, you'll have time to regenerate on to new media. The cost of the above compared to the cost of keeping it online likely means taking it offline isn't worth it. You might be able to outsource this effectively. You'd have to really trust the contractor, though. If it's privacy sensitive, I'd suggest using your own encryption, and giving the ciphertext to the contractor. Just make sure you protect the keys well. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
