Archiving and file formats (anybody concerned about this).

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We are looking at upgrading our storage / archive solution (again). During the study phase I was wondering about one aspect which I neglected up to know.

We have a Helios file server running.
Sitting in our online archive (lots of disks) is about 9Tb of data (which is less than 3 years worth of data). In addition to this I have data sitting on AIT4 tapes. (an additional 5Tb going back to 2001). Now this data on tape is actually standard backup data (we are using Backbone's Netvault).

So essentially this archive data is 'helios' specific' (eg. there are the .rsrc folders with the resource data in them).

Supposing that we might change the file server software at one time, this could mean a problem for us. Making part of the archived data useless (or hard to get at)

How are other dealing with this 'mac' specific archive issue?
Do people put the actual data in 'platform' independent archives before putting them to tape? (like making stuffit archives (for example)).

Just wondering what people are doing?

Regards
Peter

 

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Re: Archiving and file formats (anybody concerned about this).

Peter-
We are backing up our data (not quite as much as yours, but still) to AIT-4 tapes. We use an Apple XServe for storage with a 3TB RAID drive. The AIT-4 is a daily backup and not an archive. I am still researching "archive" as we are running out of space on the XServe.

I have not had any problems with file format issues since I stopped backing up my Brisque to Retrospect tape across the network (what do you mean all the files are corrupt? REALLY? THE WHOLE F*******g BATCH?).

I am as interested as you in what the community is using for this stuff, though.