Do you archive and/or maintain a backup on or offsite for your customers files / jobs?

If so, what are you using for this process? Is it automated or manual? Do you have insurance on it? Do you test your backup / restore process regularly? Are your archives online or offline? Do you archive source files. with or without modifications? What about RIP files like PDF or 1 bit TIFFS?

Currently we do archiving of completed jobs to DVD manually, then catalog using a utility called CDFinder. But I'm trying to convince management to purchase a tape drive and Retrospect in order to automate the process. For some reason it's a tough sell, they seem to have an unfounded fear of tapes, even though I keep pointing out studies on backup media reliablity and how tapes are far superior to optical media.

What about you Patrick? What are you using?

I have used a couple different back systems.

At one shop I had got them to get a tape drive with retrospect and had two backup systems, one would backup a production folder on each local drive nightly and one would backup an archive folder on the weekend.

That system worked well and finding repeat jobs was easy.

After the hire of an IT manager all files where placed on a Raid5 mirrored server, this ended up to be a BIG mistake. We lost all files on that server.

Craig

I despise tape media! Not that optical options are any better.

Unless you are sending your removable media offsite, what is the point? Why not just archive to disk? Hard drive space is cheap, reliable and incredibly quickly to access.

We currently backup through a nightly regiment between .5 and 1.0 terabytes of WIP for prepress; this is done during and using our corporate backup of another .6 to 1.2 terabytes per night. Currently all backups are written to LTO media and stored offsite.

Prepress archives are currently being done to tapes and optical media that are kept onsite. We are in the process to migrating to online disk storage for archive and will archive to media only work that we are contractually obligated to retain. That media will be sent offsite. That will be done on LTO media.

Our online disk archive will be in a RAID-5 configuration providing a reasonable degree of redundancy.

We have been using Retrospect for about 15 years. It is automated, reliable and has great search capabilities, the backup runs every night and the log is checked in the morning. Recently I have had to find files from 1995 and had no problems finding them. I backup my catalogs to CD/DVD every 6 months to avoid having to rebuild from tape. We also start a new catalog every year for redundancy.

So how long do you keep the files. Do you charge your customers for that service or do it just for operational benefit? How often do you go back to the files? Do you archive original files, ripped files, etc?

What's the point of sending media offsite?

Are we talking about archiving (saving completed jobs for possible future reprints) or are we talking about backup (protecting in-progress job data)? Because as far as backup, all of our jobs are stored on a RAID server, which our IT department assures us provides a high degree of redundancy in case of failure.

And as cheap as hard drives are becoming, they still don't match tape as far as $/gigabyte yet. Especially with the newer LTO-3 tapes pushing 400-800GB per $150 cassette.

The point to sending media offsite? Maybe disaster recovery? Business Continuity? In other words, surviving a disaster.

$/gigabytes is not a complete picture. Total cost of ownership is more important. Additional costs of tape include time, media management, drive cleaning, backup management, restoration testing, physical space (tape storage), etc.

Granted, it is probably a scale issue. If you are archiving only a tape a month (possibly 2) many of those factors don't increase the cost significantly; however, if you are archiving hundreds of gigs to terabytes per month before long you all bets are off.

We use a couple of Apple Xserve RAID's for storage (RAID5) and have a disk-disk-tape backup strategy.
For tape storage we use Retrospect and a Spectralogic 2K AIT4 robot system.



Arcade