definitely avoid the optical media. i burn cds if i want to move data around or make something easy to play in a commercial cd player or dvd player. never for archiving something i actually care about.
the first thing you need to figure out is your total storage needs. how many of those 200MB tiff files do you need to keep around? how often are they produced?
emile's right. at this point in time, regular hard drives are the best and cheapest option. you can build a 1TB raid drive for $1k. for that price, i'd actually recommend getting two and making them redundant. raid protects you from a drive failing, but it won't help you if you accidentily delete something that you shouldn't have. so build one big drive to store your stuff and then build another as a backup and setup a nightly script that automatically copies stuff to the backup drive. i can't stress the 'automatically' enough. any backup strategy that involves someone having to remember to do something on a regular basis is absolutely doomed to catastrophic failure. the one day that you forget to copy stuff over to the backup drive is the day that you accidently delete everything. murphy's law guarantees it.
as i said above, i'm not really sure how much we will need to keep around. i think i'm going to have to poke around the other microarray labs and find out what their storage solutions are.
i will definitely look into some type of automatic script, because if not, everything would depend on me...
anders pearson - 2005-06-09 20:03:46
definitely avoid the optical media. i burn cds if i want to move data around or make something easy to play in a commercial cd player or dvd player. never for archiving something i actually care about. the first thing you need to figure out is your total storage needs. how many of those 200MB tiff files do you need to keep around? how often are they produced? emile's right. at this point in time, regular hard drives are the best and cheapest option. you can build a 1TB raid drive for $1k. for that price, i'd actually recommend getting two and making them redundant. raid protects you from a drive failing, but it won't help you if you accidentily delete something that you shouldn't have. so build one big drive to store your stuff and then build another as a backup and setup a nightly script that automatically copies stuff to the backup drive. i can't stress the 'automatically' enough. any backup strategy that involves someone having to remember to do something on a regular basis is absolutely doomed to catastrophic failure. the one day that you forget to copy stuff over to the backup drive is the day that you accidently delete everything. murphy's law guarantees it.lani - Tue 14 Jun 2005 23:43:16
as i said above, i'm not really sure how much we will need to keep around. i think i'm going to have to poke around the other microarray labs and find out what their storage solutions are. i will definitely look into some type of automatic script, because if not, everything would depend on me...