a large backup setup any ideas?

Question

i do allot of video editing and movie creation at home as ahobby. How ever i was wondering is tehre someting else besides getting a bunch of external hard drives to store all the infor? For instance like one unit i can add ore space to with out spending 4 grand? i have just to many external hard drives and not enough ports to use them with lol.

Answer 1

The best and cheapest answer is to buy/build another computer that you are just going to use as space. You can put upto 5 hard drives in one computer and the max amount of space currently each hard drive will hold is 750GB. That is 3.75 TeraBytes (TB)! You can either wire network or wireless network them together, and it is just like having 5 external hard drives hooked into your own computer. Or it is like having your very own storage server.

The storage computer doesn't have to have anything high tech, just make sure that it has enough RAM (about 1GB or more) and a fast enough processor (nothing less than dual-core (Intel or AMD)). You don't need any kind of high-tech graphics card or any cool additives, just the basics on everything else!

This is exactly what I did to store all of my photographs. If you need any help or would like me to help you build your computer, let me know.

Thanks!
Charlie
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Answer 2

I use network drives, since the transfer rate is good and you can have many of them hooked up to a router, but an alternate way would be to just build a REALLY cheap PC, or maybe use one you have laying around, hook it up to a router and stick the max number of hard drives in it (you can build something with SATA for $300 or so, then just add storage, share all your folders, protect them if you want.... With a basic desktop setup, you can have 4 SATA drives and 4 IDE drives, you pick the size :) Basically a server setup, but you don't need expensive equipment or setup, since you'll only have one user - yourself, then you can shut it off and not use it until you need it, or you can keep it in a closet with just a network cable (Remote desktop works GREAT for a setup like this, since you won't need a 2nd monitor or keyboard/mouse, i used to have that setup with just a pentium 2 PC, but i don't need it anymore)...
I agree with the tape drive method, it's definately reliable and you can store a lot of data, but it's not in my price range.
Good luck.

Answer 3

If you are making dvd's check out ratdvd. It will allow you to compress your dvd's to about 700 meg. You can still watch them on your computer, and they can be uncompressed again to burn to a disk. It's real handy when storing dvd's. Otherwise, I suggest getting rewritable dvd's and a program like incd that will make the dvd pretty much like a small hard drive. You can make changes on the fly, and it doesn't requre you to reburn the disk. You could keep projects on those disks and just put in the disk you want to use. One thing about it that kinda sucks, is that once you use a disk with incd, then that's all it can be used for. You can use it multiple times with incd, but you can't reformat it to burn a disk, it's stuck like a little hard drive disk.

Answer 4

It might be time for a tape drive or something like http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2099289,00.asp