I just want to say a massive thank you to everyone contributing advice and thoughts here. There’s a lot to get through and I’m taking my it all in.

To those saying we should be charging for this, we hear you, you’re not the first to tell us. We’re looking into implementing that going forward and need to assess how we’ll tackle that for older clients.

I feel like this is a good point to assess our whole data infrastructure (live edits and archiving) and we’ll keep you all up to date once we decide on a direction. In the meantime keep the thoughts rolling in!

More random than I’d want. Generally predictable though.

Love this. Do you know who you use for your library licence?

Haha we’ve been this way for 12 years. Certainly not ideal if we scale. But we won’t ever. 4 of us ever needing access. And transferring over the network is not an issue. NAS is too slow for most real time editing. 10gbe is fine but still fairly slow. Those raids will soon be upgraded to SSD raids for each editor. Thanks tho…

Yeah we’ve got a solid situation for our live projects. Each of us work off 40TB thunderbolt raids with local external drives as our backup and live online backup to Dropbox.

This is for our archived work, but yeah of that, we access around 20-40TB fairly regualrly. Good to know that tape won’t compress video data at all!

NAS is sounding more and more like our best bet.

Yeah sweet. I haven’t checked in on the Slow Mo Guys storage setups in a while. I’ll have a watch.

Agreed. But we’re a relatively small business, so need a balanced cost. AWS is ~$10,000AUD/month for what we’re after from memory.

Yeah we looked into it. But as subven1 pointed out, it’s a brutal monthly cost.

Just copying from a response above:

This is only for archived projects. But we’d probably still need to access ~10-20TB of that data relatively regualry to update branding, or change edits, etc. Saying that, as mentioned in the OP, if we went tape or cloud, we’ll likely have a physical local copy on an external hard drive for quicker access. We just need a redunant back up of these archives.

If we went NAS, I feel like maybe we could get away without the redundancy? Risky…