Backup & Protection
Here at Advanced Media, we specialize in offering comprehensive solutions in protecting, storing, backing-up and preserving your content. Because we think that your content is invaluable and you deserve to own it for the rest of time.
• Magnetic Tape & LTO Backup (to date, the most reliable, understood and proven backup and storage media)
• Hard Drives & Network
• Solid State (Flash, thumb and solid drives)
• Optical (DVD, Blu-ray)
• Climate-controlled Media Vault Facility
• Critical-only and Consolidated Backup
• Fault Tolerant and RAID 0
• Primary Content Archiving
• File Encryption
Contact our experienced staff to learn more about how we can help you with ensuring your media and content is safe and secure for life.
Due to the personal experience of massive data loss, we at Advanced Media have taken this subject matter rather seriously. In fact, very few people take the time to fully understand the implications of the age we are in, which has been dubbed by many as the Information Age. With the invention and implementation of the World Wide Web in 1991, the world is literally just about 20 years old. The information age enables those who take advantage of it to leverage their ideas, reach new audiences and markets, minimize their expenses among many other advantages, while at the same time making many jobs obsolete, outsourced and highly competitive from a global standpoint. It is estimated that about only 20% of the US population today is able to profit and engage in intellectual and mind-related work benefiting from the Internet. This is a leading cause of growing income inequality, which today in the U.S., is comparable to South America.
Why are we telling you all this?
For one reason, and one reason only. We want you to be able to continuously profit and benefit from the use of your media, and remain leveraged and competitive in an ever-increasing competitive world. We want to ensure that your media is in good hands and is safe and secure. We want to make sure that you are ready for the major shift that is happening with the growth of the information age.
Technology has enabled individuals and companies alike to benefit from multiple and customized content protection, backup and safety options. Generally speaking the four most important factors you need to consider when looking for protection and backup solutions are:
• Level and redundancy of protection
• Security and privacy of protection
• Future implications of protection
• Cost of protection
Cost is the easiest factor to consider, since the amount of money spent in taking precautions and protecting your media and content should be paramount to its value and potential. If you have content that is worth over a million dollars or that cannot be reproduced, it would be far wiser to invest money in protection as an insurance measure, vs. content that can be easily reproduced or that has little value.
The next factor, level and redundancy are very important. Level of protection takes into account how diversified your protected elements are and how many copies you have of each asset. Just like a mutual fund that diversifies its stock portfolio to mitigate against a certain stock or industry going down, your strategy needs to implement such scenarios. Relatively speaking, three levels of protection are the industry average. That means that content is being stored in three different locations.
We at Advanced Media recommend having a double redundancy, meaning each location has a cloned backup of the content. In the most ideal case, the clone would be an extremely stable media. We consider stable media to be a tangible form of media, such as tape-based media (digital tape and LTO). Solid state and flash drives are relatively new and we do not know how they behave when exposed to electric shock, impact and other detrimental conditions.
Mechanical hard disks are some of the most volatile forms of media available, and we certainly do not recommend them as solitary form of backup. There are many additional considerations that go into level and redundancy protection, such as whether the media is being mobilized often or not at all, if it is being accessed and modified often or not, and/or re-written more than once.
Security and Privacy.
We go under the assumption that your content is invaluable and that it is of a private nature, or at least that unless shared, it needs to remain private and secure. One can imagine that storing media at a private residence makes it far more susceptible to risk than having it kept at a commercial storage facility. Another option is utilizing a climate-controlled dedicated vaulted facility, built specifically for the media industry. You definitely want to prevent unauthorized access and use of your media. Storing your media on a drive at a private residence can result in such an event. On the same note, storing your content on a virtual online “cloud†can allow it to be easily breached (read more about benefits and disadvantages of online backup in the Digital File Services page). Accidental deletions happen too. It is good practice to keep your content backed up on media that is not being used unless recovery or access is required. At the end of the day, what use do you have for the best and most secure media storage facility, if an unauthorized person can access and delete the content?
Lastly, the future prospects and usability of your protection and backup strategy must be factored in. While there are no guarantees, you do want to be able to access your content 20 years from now without having to locate a specialty service provider, pay a fortune or pray that it still works. That is where diversification comes to play.
Traditionally, major file types have backward compatibility and legacy features, meaning that you can read a file today that was created 10 years ago or more. Tape formats and LTOs, while considered by industry experts as extremely safe and reliable could be phased out and hard to access years from now. However, while drives may seem today as a safe bet, anyone well versed on computer technology, would know that the older SCSI type connections are pretty much gone, and good luck finding a computer that will connect them. Zip and Jazz are similar examples.
Also, widely known is the 5 1/4“ and 3.5†floppies. Once an industry standard, today, it is an archaic relic. It took about 10 years from complete domination to complete disappearance. Industry experts suspect that this trend will only increase in speed.
As you can see, there is a lot to consider and learn when it comes to protecting, storing and backing up your media.
We at Advanced Media, know that whether you are a loyal customer or client, a prospect or simply an individual or organization with an active interest in this subject matter – your content is invaluable. It is our goal to ensure you have it for lifetime.