Once again, an interesting post on Jill Hurst-Wahl’s Digitization 101 Blog. She started by discussing tape backup issues. In the comments, I discussed my solution of using multiple spinning disks. Another commenter, Ike, provided an extensive review of file system options and his opinions on what works (and doesn’t) for long-term storage. Ike’s comment is fascinating and has lots of food for thought. Here is the post.

Oh, and the discussion started about images, but it pertains equally to audio and video. Ike was certainly clear on his thoughts about data tape. As I see it (without following it too closely), the marketplace is consolidating around LTO and appears to be shrinking, so maybe he’s right. I’ve stayed away from data tape in favour of an all-disk solution (for approximately 3 TB of storage at the moment).

When looking at storage for audio, consider a track-hour (i.e. a mono program) at 96,000 samples per second, 24 bits, is about 1 GB, uncompressed. 1 TB is about 1,000 track-hours of material at the normal high-resolution sample rate and bit depth…and that currently fits on one physical drive.