Just curious if any artists out there have dabbled into storing archives long term in AWS servers versus buying little hard drives? I am wondering how long do people tend to keep archives, mine are about two years then I recycle them but with the costs of cloud and redundancies it looks fairly cost effective to just load them into the cloud and set to keep for two years if I need them , I think from what I gathered it would be cheaper than buying HDD . So curious if anyone else out there is going this route?
Wasabi. $6/TB per month.
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I generate about 40-50 Tb of archives a year. That would mean close to 100 Tb if I were to keep them for 2 years. Currently I archive to both a SAN and LTO tape. For fast retrieval, I keep about 20tb on the san that I continually update or clear out depending on the status of the job. I keep the LTO’s for about 8 years. Yes, I have gone back that far, and recently I lamented no longer having a backup for something that was over 10 years old. As an editorial facility we are moving into cloud based storage, but it doesn’t seem economically viable for me at this point.
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Compress the Flame archives and save 30-65%.
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I don’t think you can’t do that when you archive direct to LTO. I don’t tar from the san to the LTO. It takes to long to retrieve later.
I am also using wasabi, albeit uncompressed and for shorter timeframes, mainly as a disaster preparedness measure as opposed to a long term solution. I was using it for longer term storage until I pulled up my dashboard one day and saw a bunch of GIANT archives that I hadn’t touched in a year or more, so I decided to rethink things.
I looked at LTO for my home setup, but drive plus media seemed like an insane price to pay, and I’m friends with too many engineers to trust hard drives on a shelf to spin up when I need them.
So my current setup is to back up my project directory (which includes daily archives) to my synology, which in turn backs up to wasabi. As projects get older, they get migrated off of my project drive, moved into longer-term storage on the synology (still mirrored to wasabi), and eventually to a deep-freeze which is backed up to backblaze along with everything else I own. From there I can decide if I want to keep it, or blow it away. Most of the time I will blow it away after a year or so. I suppose I could compress it somewhere in there, but also it seems that as soon as I got this thing dialed in, between chronosync, wasabi, and synology, I got put in five months (and counting) of teradici jobs.
Finally, and I realize this is completely irrational, but I think compression is witchcraft, so the idea of compressing archives is kinda repellent to me. Again, I know: Crazy. But it is what it is.
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@kirk it’s magic. Compression is the future. Or make less data. Your call. 
Compressing archives is the bomb. With a big studio it’d easily save 5 or 6 figures a year. With a small studio or one woman band it means that cloud storage is a possibility. There’s no way that there isn’t enough time to download and uncompress and restore an archive when it takes a day to bid and a day to get a job awarded and scheduled.
Our ridiculous business practices of paying for perpetual storage is well…ridiculous. They get 12 months. Maybe 24. On the 25th month I’m sending my clients an invoice for another 2 years which will be 3% of the cost of the job. If they don’t pay they have 14 days to download from Wasabi. Or it gets deleted.
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This seems civilized.
thanks kirk, I have the same situation where I use my Nas and keep things on there for a while until I know they can go into longer term storage where I started looking at cloud solutions. The LTO thing is just not really cost effective anymore since cloud is getting so much cheaper. I don’t really need to keep jobs past two years or so as I primarily work episodics now which don’t come back around as much as commercials might do. I will check out wasabi that sounds like a solution I was looking for and then I can finally rid myself of tons of drives which just seems silly and not very cost effective.
yea I have about 100 tb a year working in episodics but with compression and some time I think cloud is getting cost effective once you run the numbers.
@randy I know you use keka but have you found the happy medium setting that works best ?
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I crank it all the way. Some is better than nothing, but more is better than some.
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I am assuming you’re using zip compression? or are you doing another flavor?
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I like 7z
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Not a problem, and I’d also like to emphasize my endorsement for chronosync, which is a delightful piece of software that will let you set up automations and works directly with wasabi, so the whole thing is pretty much fire and forget, once you get it set up. I’d never have the patience for it otherwise.
I also like wasabi but for my case LTO and NAS is still the best way.
I actually found it much more economical to not mess with archives and just to archive all media and batches by myself. Saves a lot of time and pain once you get into it, makes no sense to me to archive uncompressed (and then compress it again). Especially if its some prores source files. but thats just me I like it “the nuke way” 
yea chronosync is the best tool ever I pretty much set it up for every job and copy postings to sync with it , really an amazing tool. I will have to set it up for wasabi since it looks like I am going to give that a go versus buying more hardware which I don’t really want to do.
@randy just curious but have you looked into dropbox business , after investigating I noticed for 700 a month I can do unlimited storage on dropbox versus wasabi and based on their pricing 25 tb would cost 1800 a year, just curious if and why you decided to not go the dropbox route?
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Hmm, I can’t recall specifically. It was a while ago.
After just now looking at the spec sheet for the Dropbox Business plan, was it perhaps because their Dropbox Transfer service was limited to 100GB?
In other words, I may have (incorrectly?) interpreted that as limiting my transfers from Dropbox Business to someone else at 100GB, which, wasn’t enough for me. Darn Flame Archives.
Or am I missing something?
yea I asked the same question but the 100gb is for shared files around the team not for transfers or file sizes , basically if you share and edit a file to the tune of 100gb that is what the cap is for at least how I was understanding it when I called them
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