Hi all, Since I monetised my photography collection I need a reliable back up solution, specifically for the photos. I was doing some googling for solutions and came across RDX drives. Got to be honest, my knowledge of this was zero. You can buy a single enclosure with USB3 that allows you to access the data cartridges you plug into the enclosure as system storage. Some of the cartridge manufacturers are claiming 30 year data integrity on date stored. The prices of the cartridges seem much cheaper than some of the alternative storage mediums too. As an example, Amazon are doing a 6.15tb cartridge for £25.98 at the mo. You can buy a single enclosure for around the £100 mark too. So does anyone know if this solution can be utilised easily enough for backups on a SOHO PC? Thanks in advance
RDX cartridges are mechanical hard drives in a custom housing. They're also usually more expensive than a normal hard drive: 6TB for £30 would be an incredible bargain; I'm seeing £120 for 500GB and £230 for 2TB on Amazon right now. Personally, I would - and did - cut out the middleman and buy a trayless SATA hot-swap bay and normal 3.5" drives plus decent padded cases in which to store 'em. Way cheaper than RDX.
I'm with Gareth, I did look into this early this year and came to the conclusion that HDD (stored) is a far better way of dealing with backups LTO was my preferred method, but the LTO 6 or 7 drives were too expensive I have 16TB of backup storage (small NAS) from my main storage (32TB) but use 3 10TB drives as a backup which is at a friends house
This is what I saw on Amazon, I think I've got my tech mixed up though lol https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00AHQU...BlPc5zpdWRzWaMancepq_w5oOEeH2pKgOmDgKg2xg9v1g
That's an LTO tape - very different thing! Tape is slow, and serial access only - if you want one file, you'll be reading the entire tape (an exaggeration, but you certainly don't want to be restoring in a hurry!) Tape backups have their place, but while the tapes are cheap the drives aren't: an LTO-6 drive for that tape will cost you north of £2.5k. It also won't hold anywhere near 6TB of photos: you see the asterisk there? That's telling you it holds 6TB *compressed.* Actual raw capacity is just 2.5TB - and photos, as you know, don't compress well unless you go lossy. Edit: Get this for internal, or this for USB 3.0, then as many hard drives as you need and these to put 'em in. Remember to store at least one generation off-site - in a fireproof/waterproof safe for bonus points!
remember to periodically check you can actually *restore* from said backups too... a backup you can't restore from is just an expensive paperweight.
Cheers for the info, much appreciated! I'm glad I asked. That internal bay looks great but I've no 5.25" bays or even 3.25" bays in my case. It's the Lian Li PC011. So it looks like USB3 is the way forward. Eventually I'm going to have to look at a NAS solution but for now I want something relatively easy to sort.
I wouldn't over complicate things at the expense of actually getting a functional backup up and running. Buying a big USB Hard Drive, copy-pasting your files onto it and then storing it somewhere safe is a fine backup solution and will compliment anything more complex in future.
Sound advice, thank you! I've been using online backups but have hit the storage limits on two of the accounts and I'm not prepared to keep shelling out more each time I do, so some physical form of backup at home is the only way for me now. I saw 6.15TB at twenty odd quid and got excited about that, turns out it was nothing to get excited about so USB HDD will do fine for me for the foreseeable future.
