Can anyone recommend a long term image storage solution? Right now, we have drawers full of hard drives and I was wondering if there was a better way, such as storing images on a server.
A great question. And one I am sure will make you big $$ if you figure out. For a long time people said CD/DVD was the way to go and then they discovered CD-rot. Tapes become obsolete when the software or drives that read them become inoperable or the tapes become brittle from incorrect storage and cannot thread. HDDs are somewhat a size problem, a problem from an environmental or magnetic influence perspective, etc. Google long term data storage and there are thousands of hits proclaiming it to be a problem, with little in the way of useful solutions.
From a systems administrators perspective, I would suggest that the best method currently to store data of that volume would be to write to tape.
Disk has an estimated lifespan of 4 to 6 years - less if it isn't spinning ( having said that I had one 8Gb disk in a Mac that has lasted 10 years until it croaked a few weeks ago … ).
Tape has an estimated lifespan ( in good conditions ) of 20 to 30 years, and no moving parts to seize up.
Ironically the big issue with tape retention is not so much the tapes degrading over time, as the technology being superseded by more modern devices and not having the correct drive available to restore with …
LTO tapes are currently the favourites, being able to hold at most 800Gb uncompressed and 1.6Tb (estimated) compressed. They are approximately 4 inches square, and less than an inch thick - so they should take up less space to store than a draw full of drives …
Downsides are obviously are the costs and the space required for the drive, tape robots are lovely if you have a large volume of data, but horrendously expensive - a single drive, in the UK, is £1,800 ish for a 400Gb uncompressed/800Gb compressed, and approx £30 per cartridge … ( These are for LTO Ultrium 3 tapes. )
Now, this isn't speaking from experience in a Forensic Lab, rather having worked with some very large data sets in various scientific labs that churn out petabytes in a year …
I must admit, that I have been recently wondering what disaster recovery policies and procedures that people might have in place in their labs - the UK weather has very kindly reminded us that we need to have all of these things in place … I wonder ( out loud ) what other people have in place for backup ?
We image and then burn to tape. We've recently acquired an LTO4, which is 800megs/1.6compressed.