What do #Electrophysiologists who record raw data from many channels (#NeuroPixels, #Hyperdrives…) do for data backup and storage? I just bought 2 x 4Tb external drives and it looks like they won’t be enough (at all). Is there a cheap and reliable AND huge storage way to do this?
@elduvelle_neuro
NAS for sure :) here I just made my notes on ours public:
https://wiki.aharoni-lab.com/Seedbank
Not well organized as a guide, and a lot of the stuff is mysteriously badly documented, but once you cut through that its reasonable to DIY. Lots of links to other guides at the bottom.
That machine has 30x 16.38TB drives = ~490TB total storage. Cut that in half for drive redundancy and half again for backups. Ideally you would have two of those for backups in two different places, but thats another story.
I can walk ya through the ZFS part, and once you get that it basically appears as one humongous hard drive that you can rsync to as normal/mount as a network drive on your local machine/etc. If youre interested it would be a reasonably good excuse to sit down and organize a guide.
@jonny thank you! It’s great that you have some doc for it! I’ll be helping set up a new lab soon and this might come in handy - I’ll probably ask you more about this in a few months.
My current lab already has a NAS I think but at the moment I’m looking for a backup for that as none of my computers have enough storage to hold all the data at once and I don’t really like having it just in one place, even if that’s on a RAID system
@elduvelle_neuro
Yes get more NAS. U can rig em up to duplicate and back up from each other :)
This!
A NAS is the best obvious solution. But it must be properly backed up. Even if it is a RAID array.
