How Do You Backup 20TB of Data?

Sean0michael writes: Recently I had a friend lose their entire electronic collection of music and movies by erasing a RAID array on their home server. He had 20TB of data on his rack at home that had survived a dozen hard drive failures over the years. But he didn't have a good way to backup that much data, so he never took one. Now he wishes he had.

Asking around among our tech-savvy friends though, no one has a good answer to the question, "how would you backup 20TB of data?". It's not like you could just plug in an external drive, and using any cloud service would be terribly expensive. Blu-Ray discs can hold a lot of data, but that's a lot of time (and money) spent burning discs that you likely will never need. Tape drives are another possibility, but are they right for this kind of problem? I don' t know. There might be something else out there, but I still have no feasible solution.

So I ask fellow slashdotters: for a home user, how do you backup 20TB of Data?

Tapes

[nobuddy]

You either spend an assload of money on some redundant NAS or another disk array to back up to, or you get a tape library.

I have been out of backup industry for a few years, but as far as I know tape is still the most cost effective backup system for large storage needs.
A quick google shows you can get 20TB tape arrays in the $2000-$3000 range. Tapes are extra, of course. I see those for about $200 per 5T tape, or thereabouts.

Backing up data ain't cheap- but it's still cheaper than replacing it.

Re:

[AHuxley]

Yes it depends on the costs for a set of 10 2TB++ 24/7 server grade HD plus a few more for an array and the hardware to house it.
@ a few $100 per drive or less depending on MTBF, 5 year support, brand vs tape or a second set of HDs :)