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Keeping data on live hard disks costs quite a bit more than archiving it to tape or DVD and sticking it in a file cabinet.
by ars 6y ago
Keeping data on live hard disks costs quite a bit more than archiving it to tape or DVD and sticking it in a file cabinet.
- jdeibele 6y agoThere's a one-time purchase of bigger/more disks. Figure 1GB (50 20MB pictures) per customer. Just add another 2TB, then 4TB, now 8TB or bigger drive. That's about $250 or $300 each time. Double that for a sync'd drive somewhere in the office. Now they should be doing 3-2-1 backups. With S3 they'd be paying $160/month (for storage, not counting other costs) for 8TB or $40/month for BackBlaze B2. That's 8,000 customers. They're in England so some variance in pricing. But it would be relatively inexpensive to buy big drives, sync them to a set in the office, and back them up online. Where the doctors or whoever is running the clinics can SEE the data is still there whenever they want. I agree that there should be increasing worry about keeping information that you don't need, whether it's intimate pictures of your surgical clients or people who bought from you 5 years ago and not since. But it seems like keeping things handy will be an impulse that's hard to overcome.
- novok 6y agoTBH DVDs / Blu-Rays are too low density, expensive and labor intensive, and tape drives start at $1000 and most non tech professionals don't know they even exist. 2.5TB of 25 100GB writable BDXL disks cost about $250. A 4TB drive costs $80 and a computer to throw in 3.5" HDDs pretty cheap too.
- namibj 6y agoBlu-Ray (the cheap ones, 25/50 GB) is actually cheaper than tape, if you care for that. But yeah, they are less dense.
- lmm 6y agoNot if you want the same level of access assurance.