Re:CDs still a pain. Keep it alive and available. (Score 1)

Mc900ftjesus sounds like the guy who lost his job maintaining tapes because the company switched to RAID.

First, I think it is important to take a look at possible expected data storage needs. At 100GB in one year, it would not be unreasonable for it to at least double every year due to increasing resolutions, vacations, digital copies of art work, etc. At 2**(number of years) * 100GB, I estimate about 50 TB in 10 years. (Ya, I know that sounds like a lot, but 10 years ago no-one thought they would ever need more than 2 GB of hard drive space). With that said, it is not practical to create a single storage system with today's tools that will last 10 years. At best you can make a practical system last 5 to 6 years with these kinds of storage demands.

Mc900ftjesus did bring up several short comings but all can be overcome or also exist when written to tape. The argument corruption written to one disk is written to all disk is the same with tape. For the failed controller argument, replacement controllers can be purchased if using hardware RAID, but tapes can go bad, as can the tape drive. If concerned about future availability of drives or controllers, purchase two extra and a few extra hard drives. When using Raid 1,5,6 or 1+0 with a hardware controller, there exists built in fault tolerance that allows for one, two, or more hard drives (depending on the raid configuration), controllers, motherboards, and even operating systems to go bad if you have the knowledge to deal with these challenges.

I would point out that RAID should not be the only backup system though. As with any good disaster recovery plan, additional offsite storage in case of fire, robbery or any other kind of disaster that could destroy the whole machine.

I would also say that tape has many problems in itself, such as the inability to verify or retrieve data easily. Imagine going through a 3 TB of 400GB tape to find that image you accidentally just deleted from your main computer that you know was in the 'Grandma and Grandpa X-mas 2008' folder, but you don't know the exact file name . Also, for large amounts of data, RAID is likely to be much cheaper with even the most redundant forms of RAID. If you want to test this cost theory and want to include replacement parts for the RAID system (extra controllers and drives), please do the same with the tape backup system. I would also point out that tape does have a shelf life, even in the best environments, and should not be the sole backup.

In my personal opinion, tape is only for last resort disaster recovery, but still plays an important role. I hope mc900ftjesus does not fire me for this.