The Scariest Sound A Video Editor Will Ever Hear

[Bassman2003]

Always sorry to hear about issues. Backups are tough because they are non revenue generating but can be revenue destroyers! I have never trusted any of the forms of RAID for anything other than speed (as stated
). Buying drives in pairs has been my approach where one drive is always on the shelf. Having a strict 'never have less than 2 digital copies of anything' is another must. Multiple copies seems like the easiest and most dependable approach.

One positive as NVMe drives become more affordable, the transfer times are insane. So it is easier to move large files around.

[jbregar]

This is why my camera files get written to two LTO tapes immediately after ingest then shelved in separate locations.

Working files are mirrored up to a RAID 6 NAS which is then copied to a second UnRAID server (UnRAID is pretty nifty in that it isn't a RAID but uses parity... so you can sustain--in my case--two drive failures and not lose any data... but when the third drive dies, you just lose the data on the failed drives. The non-failed drives continue to work as they did before).

When I'm done with a project, it gets written out to LTO tape(s) and shelved off-site. It also lives on the big UnRAID box (and the NAS for a year) if I need to get to it. The UnRAID box is about to move to a big iron SuperMicro 36-bay server case that'll allow it to expand past 300TB. It's at just over 80TB now. UnRAID is really the bees knees for a big, easily-expandable tank of networked disk storage. I also use it to run a lot of the infrastructure stuff on my network through Dockers and VMs. I'm actually thinking about building out an ingest VM on there so I can offload that from my workstations.

All the network stuff is connected via 10Gb ethernet, so it's pretty dang fast when it's doing its thing.

Very important stuff like business documents and the like are... in addition to the above... mirrored up to Backblaze B2 and Amazon Glacier as a final line of defense.