[ardour-users] backup systems (was: Re: best file system for audio)

Peter Lutek plutek at infinity.net
Fri Jan 20 06:18:24 PST 2006


Mark Knecht wrote:

>On 1/19/06, Bengt Gördén <bengan at sunet.se> wrote:
>  
>
>>On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 08:17:17PM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>It's not RAID. It's a multiple 1394 disk set up that only works with
>>>Ardour. Ardour decides which audio files go to which drives and
>>>attempts to spread out the disk I/O over the three drives.
>>>      
>>>
>>Ah. Ok. Understood.
>>
>>
>>    
>>
>>>I wouldn't know how to run bonnie++ on that.....
>>>      
>>>
>>Me neither :-)
>>
>>
>>    
>>
>>>I have played a bit with stuff like hdparm -tT running on all three
>>>drives at the same time and seen that I get a lot more throughput than
>>>I get to any single drive. I have 2 1394a drives on one controlelr and
>>>1 1394b drive on a separate controller.
>>>      
>>>
>>It still sounds like a very nice idea. I think I'll adopt it. We have
>>some spare disks and 1394 controllers at work that I can test with
>>before I go ahead and buy something.
>>
>>regards,
>>
>>    
>>
>
>I haven't had the money to work on this, nor do I know of the right
>controllers, but the newer PCI-Express motherboards are coming with a
>16x socket for the VGA and 2-3 1x slots for future expansion. I expect
>that a couple of 1394 1x PCI-E cards would be even better than doing
>this on a 33MHz PCI bus.
>
>The future is bright I think.
>
>Have fun. If you are truly limited by disk I/O (I was a bit) then this
>will help with that.
>
>NOTE: One complication to doing this is that Ardour provide NO
>automatic way to back up sessions, much less ones that are spread
>around on different file systems. Since you will now have files spread
>around YOU are responsible for collecting those together for backups,
>as well as sprinkling them around when doing a session restore. A
>great area for Ardour to look at in the future would be to do this for
>us. I'd like to back all files in multiple session directories up to
>DVD media. It would be very cool for this to be made error free.
>  
>
hmmm.... the whole backup thing is becoming problematic, just because of 
file sizes. i don't really see dvd as a viable option, since sessions 
are frequently 20Gb or more for me. high-capacity tape drives are very 
expensive, and i'm not convinced about the long-term 
reliability/compatibility. currently, i'm using external hard drives, 
and just praying for no drive failures. i did have one fail on me a few 
years ago, and have switched to lacie drives; no problems so far, but i 
know i'm tempting fate. as bandwidth and storage capacity become 
increasing cheap and network speeds increase, an attractive option may 
be offsite archiving by uploading to internet-based file storage 
services. it is their business to ensure security of data with redundant 
servers, monitoring, etc.

there are a number of new nano-optical disks in development which get 
into the multi-terabyte range, but i guess they're a few years down the 
road.

-p




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