First of all, this is not for me, it's for my mom. I have an iMac with home movies and photos and all kinds of stuff, but I have a manageable amount. I use Carbonite + Time Machine to an external drive and I'm satisfied. My mom on the other hand, is kind of in a jumbled mess of Carbonite and multiple external drives with different content on each drive. She wants me to help her get everything archived both in a permanent state, and a local state in case she wants to look at them.

Right now she has about 5 external drives of various manufacture and size that hold her movies. A lot of these movies are old old home movies of her grandparents that were converted from film over to digital. Obviously, she does not want to lose them. My first thought was to do a combo of Carbonite + 1 big expensive NAS with lots of storage...but due to the size of all of the home movies combined, I'm not sure if the cost is feasible for her. Carbonite could permanently keep them backed up, but the catch is that Carbonite will only keep files on their servers for 30 days...so basically, you can't just store files on an external drive, back them up to Carbonite, and then stick the drive in a lock box somewhere.

So do any of you have suggestions on what to do here? I know there's going to be a point where she is going to have to spend a considerable amount of money on local storage to keep all of the video close at hand AND online. I guess I could compress the video files, but I don't want to lose the quality of them even though they are old and grainy. Of course, not all of the movies are old, but I would say a good 60% of the files are really old.

Suggestions??

For things of personal importance, I try to (a) keep two hard drives with copies of everything on it at home, and (b) burn a library of DVDs and keep them off site (like, at my parents house, or in my filing cabinet at work - anywhere not at home). It's hard to keep the DVD system up-to-date with our ever-growing photo library, given the lousy organization we have, but home movies are easy enough to do this with, since each movie gets a disk.

A NAS might be okay as long as the connection is stable. I once had a NAS that would drop connection for seconds (or less) and it corrupted a bunch of my files (during transfers, of course), so that was not fun.

For that level of data and for the type of integrity you are looking for, you will probably find it more cost-effective in the long run to use business-class products. Perhaps a media server with a raid array on it, good backup software for local offsite storage, and some remote option like you are using with Carbonite; the remote files should be compressed using some lossless compression software to maintain quality.

I know there are also "desktop" extrnal RAID devices, but I have never used those, so I cannot recommend them at this time, especially over the proven effectiveness of a legitimate server.

None of this is cheap, but it will provide the storage levels and protection you desire.

I have a Windows file server running in my basement..


I find it odd that your mom has that many files. I thought I was unusual with 2TB. Does she really have 6 TB of drives in use, or is that just the labeled drive space that she has?


I use a Windows XP PC in my basement for a file server. I have a UPS for power backup, for graceful shut downs. (You can get a decent PC for $200. All it has to do is shuffle files around so it doesn't need to be new or the latest. I'm just using USB adapters for my drives for storage.)

I remote desktop into that PC, and do my maintenance that way.

I use a program called 'Folder Match' to duplicate my drives. Sounds kinda hoky, but I have had a drive fail, and I was up and running in minutes. I swapped out the bad drive, and put in the good one. I had a new back up done the next day.

My file server shares various directories on one drive at all times.. Music, Video, Pictures, Backup, Games.



I've also run NAS and other experiments in the past. NAS systems usually run Linux, and loose files. They don't handle power outages well at all, and moving files around can be real clunky.

Its a Mom...

Are you sure she's not talking Mega Bytes and Floppies?


3TB Western Digital Caviar Green $170. X4
ESATA to USB Adapter $45. X4
Crappy old PC... $200
Folder Match, $40
UPS $170 (Get a good one)

You will never loose files, only drives. You must keep up with the Jones' for a while. Every 4-5 years, you must buy a new crappy PC, and or upgrade your hard drives.

Wow! 6TB! Not sure we have that much in work!!

If it were PC, I'd be saying something like Backup Buddy spread amoungst her children/friends etc (no idea if it works for Macs to be honest!)

Then something like a decent Raid 5 NAS, so at least they're all in 1 place and not duplicated.

But 6TB is going to cost!

As far as changing the file format to something a little smaller, I'd almost guarantee yes if she's not processing them to DVD etc.

MPEG4 (possibly x264) would probably be where I'd look at first. I'm pretty certain that with a Mac, you have the software already to do this. [Sorry, I haven't worked with video for a while].

The other final thing is maybe get a Blu-ray burner and a couple of hundred disks...

so I talked to my mom about this last night, and I told her the potential cost of around $1,000 for a true redundant setup that covers all 6TB. She was pretty shocked, but then I told her that in all honesty...she just has too many movies. I think she is just going to go through them and pair them down to just the clips she wants/likes and be good with that.

Thanks for the help though!