Storage, Storage, Everywhere

A recent thread on the Revit MEP discussed the topic of archiving Revit projects.  With the transition to Revit as the primary design and documentation tool for a project, this presents an order of magnitude larger need for long-term storage for most firms.  In this case, a user was concerned about the amount of space needed to archive projects.

This thread pointed out that there still may be folks out in the user community that don't realize that storage is mad cheap these days.  So I thought I'd point out some good options for folks out there.

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

This is an enclosure that contains one or more hard drives, and is connected to your network.  It generally shows up as a network drive on your machine.  Check out the Wiki on this to learn more.

You can configure your NAS as a RAID array, to better plan for the eventual failure of your drive.

You can get these cheap...a Gigabit bandwidth 1Terabyte version can be found on Amazon for about $350.

Cloud-Based Storage

The next step, IMO, is to use cloud-based storage.  This option allows you to use web services to have basically unlimited storage capacity "in the cloud", rather than building that infrastructure in your organization.  The theory goes that the infrastructure to support this need is best handled by the folks who focus a business on the subject.  Everybody's got web access these days, and a backup by definition means that the data does not need to be accessed frequently, or at the speeds available in your internal network.

This would be my choice, if I were an IT guy.  The best option out there, IMO, is the Amazon S3 web infrustructure.  To support their business Amazon built this redundant, scalable infrastructure, and said "hmm, maybe this would be valuable to others?".  So they did, and provided that infrastructure to users at a dirt cheap price.  You can get effectively unlimited storage space in their redundant infrastructure, and if you want it to be very secure, you are able to use industry standard AES encryption.

We actualy use this for the storage of content for Autodesk Seek.

The core S3 service is not really a consumer service, so interfacing with it is non-trivial if you're not a web developer.  To meet that need, there are software vendors like JungleDisk, that have developed a simple software application to facilitate that communication.  I use this for my personal data storage, as it allows me to access my data from anywhere that has web access...pretty cool stuff.

So let's not have to worry about backing up our Revit projects, you've got some great options out there.

Comments

[Robin Capper]

I've tried a simple Revit file (no central/local stuff) on Live Mesh Preview and it's worked fine. The idea of a project being sync'ed across a number of devices, but with the performance of a local file, is appealing.

Be cool if Revit got a bit smarter in the way it managed it's files & backups too.

[chelsea]

Hello,

I run the blog Onlinestorage.org, where I post all kinds of information
related to online storage and cloud computing. For the past few months
I’ve been collecting various resources on these subjects, and I've
just posted my list of the Top 85 blogs about online storage that I
encourage my readers to visit. Your site is included, since I
always find your articles to be very informative and useful. You can check out the full list at http://www.onlinestorage.org/the-85-best-online-storage-articles-and-blogs/ and please don't forget to tell your readers about it ;)

Regards,
Chelsea
Chelsea@contentventurenetworks.com