Disk space for videos and photos

[fiza]

I am finding that alot of our disk space is being taken up with videos and photos. The videos are for assessments and exams so need to be backed up.

How do you deal with video and photo files? Do you back it all up? I was thinking of having a separate NAS Drive for videos but then I thought staff would just end up duplicating files across different drives. We dont have the manpower to trawl the drives for duplicates on a regular basis.

[CamelMan]

Could you not find the worst offenders and created a redirected folder for their My Photos and Videos to the NAS?

 

EDIT: I use FolderSize to track down our space hogs!

[fiza]

Could you not find the worst offenders and created a redirected folder for their My Photos and Videos to the NAS?

 

EDIT: I use FolderSize to track down our space hogs!

 

its more in the shared areas (department folders).

[dhicks]

I am finding that alot of our disk space is being taken up with videos and photos. The videos are for assessments and exams so need to be backed up. How do you deal with video and photo files? Do you back it all up? I was thinking of having a separate NAS Drive for videos but then I thought staff would just end up duplicating files across different drives. We dont have the manpower to trawl the drives for duplicates on a regular basis.

 

I've put aside a separate 12TB disk array for our media server, with the idea that videos and images will go on that. My plan is to get a decent Media Asset Management system of some kind on there - either something pre-written or by writing something myself. You can spot duplicates with checksums - checksum a bunch of files on one server, check them against the checksums on another server, see if any match.

 

Backups will be an issue - I have a 12TB remote server being made ready for general file and VM image backups, but it won't hold another 12TB of video / photo data. It strikes me that this is going to be an issue for an increasing number of schools in the near-ish future, and possibly someone offering a remote backup service for videos and images could make some money here.

[fiza]

possibly someone offering a remote backup service for videos and images could make some money here.

 

Remote backup services from third parties would, I am guessing, cost quite a bit for 12TB of video/photo files.

[dhicks]

Remote backup services from third parties would, I am guessing, cost quite a bit for 12TB of video/photo files.

 

Yes, exactly - hence I'm rather thinking I could run a cheaper one. We have half a rack of space spare here at school, I could pay the school for that (probably around £100 a month) and some extra bandwidth, buy a server or two (a 40TB server would be around £3,000) and start offering remote backup services in 10TB or so chunks.

[sted]

hp microserver fill it with drives and isntall 2008r2/2012 server (on a pre gen 8 aparantly 2012r2 isnt a good idea) more flexible than a nas and when theres cash back not much more (excluding licenses)

[CyberNerd]

With Google apps we just upload them to Youtube and restrict the video to people in our domain.

Same with pictures.

[bjohnny42]

Cybernerd, could you expand on this a little. Have you gone down moving your users to Google accounts?

[fiza]

With Google apps we just upload them to Youtube and restrict the video to people in our domain.

Same with pictures.

@CyberNerd - That sounds interesting. How do you restrict access to only your google domain?

[CyberNerd]

You need to enable G+ accounts for staff.

 

Google Apps users who use their Google+ identity in YouTube will now have the option to post videos that are viewable only by others at their domain. Domain-restricted videos can only be viewed through the web UI at this time. You’ll see a field under the “Privacy Settings” drop-down menu where you can add your domain to the list of people who have access to view the video.

 

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/157177