Why can't they make an attractively priced pro-sumer tape drive solution?
About 20 years ago, we used to keep track of this stuff. Even batches from normally excellent brands would be bad. We considered this short term, volatile storage.
At the end, even the best brands outsourced and we quit using them. Now, M-Disk from Verbatim is decent, although rarely used.
The problem is BluRay capacity is too low. Had it been 1TB per Disc it might stand a chance. But using 40 disc just isn't something prosumer is willing to stomach.
Not to mention both Tape and Optical Disc aren't that durable. I just read Walterbright, the author of D programming language had to throw away his code because of inadequate backup solution at the time. We dont need to store and save every video, but there are things that is worth saving. And I wish we have better solutions.
As a nerd that formerly had a DDS4 drive it's tempting to get an older LTO drive, but sadly I can't expect it to survive for long in a house full of cat hair.
And it's kinda maddening because it can't be all that hard to have some filters.
They're not only used in such controlled environments, but yes, they are pickier.
https://mlogic.com/products/mlogic-mtape-desktop-thunderbolt...
Plus, having your backups on used hardware _instills_ the importance of proper backup hygiene like nothing else!
It's cheaper for consumers to have a drive bundled with the data storage, such as a hard drive.
Tape drives will always be needed for those who need fewer IOPS but more capacity. After all, tape drives allow you to build tape libraries with custom capacity vs drives (aka IOPS and bandwidth).
Consumers are more predictable and want IOPS more than capacity. So SSDs already are better, let alone HDDs.
Sure, if you ignore my last line saying it's easy to have 2-3 copies.
> For proper archival, each project gets its own backup device not shared with other projects
"its own backup device" implies only 1 copy? That's so much worse than 3 copies on shared drives.
And who isn't using shared drives? Companies use shared drives. Amazon uses shared drives. And you could double it to 6 copies for ridiculous levels of reliability and it would still be under $10 per shoot.
And if that's twisting intent, then you twisted mine much harder with "500 shoots die with it", because I explicitly suggested multiple copies instead of just treating it as assumed. What's with this one-sided accusation?
And if you're buying three drives per client that's an extra $200 per photoshoot in this scenario if we're talking hard drives. It's a massive cost. And it would need to be hard drives, since the client certainly can't read tapes, probably can't read a bluray, and a USB stick wouldn't be reliable unplugged. Also the idea of handing over a whole drive depends on them having a full license to every file you're archiving. For a photoshoot it's just not worth it in comparison to copying their deliverables folder out of the shared vault.
Edit: I guess you could go with stacks and stacks of blurays and be ready to hand out a drive every time you hand a disc out.
There are problems with cloud backups, but they are solvable. One is confidentiality/privacy, that's what encryption is for. The other is that you can lose your data because the could provider doesn't like you, it is a failure mode, in the same way that your tapes can burn. Use redundancy, like with any unreliable storage solution.
With an onsite NAS, local copies and cloud backup, you meet the "3 2 1" rule (3 copies, 2 storage types, 1 offsite) without the hassle of dealing with tapes, and it will probably be cheaper too, unless you are particularly data-hungry.
Even if you're say Youtuber and archive your raw footage, you still want to have access to it be reasonably fast, so a NAS with a bunch of hard drives is better deal
50GB? Is that a joke?