Josh, you haven't made it clear whether this is working data or archive data. If the data is valuable there is no real difference between backup and archive, only where you store i.e. on your working system or archive system. Again if the data is valuable, your working system and archive system will be identical if you want to protect the data and observe the rules of backup.
Archive more applies to the type of media than what is stored on it. Archive implies that the data will never change i.e. Written Once, and Read Many times, commonly called WORM. WORM drives are typically tape but things such as the RDX Quikstor and RDX Quikstation (8 bay RDX station) have the WORM option for specific drives so that they cannot be over written. I suspect that the RDX Quikstation may suit your archiving.
Remember that an archive system is part of a backup plan. You should never consider having only one copy of any data.
Some rules of backup are:
3-2-1 Rule.
Three (3) copies of your data. One (1) source and two (2) backups on two different media, one (1) of which is maintained offsite.
Examples:
Onsite server backed up to onsite NAS, and backed up offsite to tape or RDX.
Onsite server backed up to onsite NAS, and backed up offsite NAS.
Onsite server backed up to onsite NAS, and real-time replicated to offsite NAS.
Your onsite backup should be disk.
Media:
Your offsite backup depends on time. Backing up offsite to portable media automatically introduces time delays. i.e. Monday’s overnight backup gets taken offsite Tuesday night. If you have a disaster before the close of business Tuesday, you lose two days worth. How much you can afford to lose depends entirely on your business and frequency of change of data.
Media storage:
Fully observe the rules for media storage. Some tapes require that you store them vertical between narrow temperature and humidity ranges, well away from sources of magnetic fields. Dropping a tape will reduce its reliability. Sending tapes home with the office girl in her handbag next her mobile phone is a disaster waiting to happen. Tapes also require anything up to two hours in the backup environment before being inserted into the drive, equalise temperature and humidity between tape and tape drive. Tapes also need to be discarded and replaced at the required time/write intervals.
Personally, for these reasons, I do not like tape. The cost is not small and neither is the cost of having someone manage it. Investing in tape but not following the rules is pointless. You can do it on the cheap but reliability drops.
Eliminate Single points of failure:
Don’t spread backup data across multiple media. E.g. full backup on one tape and differentials across 6 other tapes has multiplied your risk of data loss 7 times. If I have a backup I like it to contain all the files necessary to restore the data. Better to have 7 full backups.
In a way, raid counts as multiple media. Wherever you use RAID, make sure that it has hot swap auto failover. Have at least one spare drive in a drive bay as a dedicated hot swap spare, and the systems will automatically swap out dead drive with hot swap spare. If you have terabytes of data, consider having two or more hot swap spares in your RAID.
Observe Offsite Distances:
Your offsite distance is important. There is little point in having offsite backup if it only guards against data loss in some circumstances. Anyone who has been through an earthquake, flood, tornado, hurricane etc will tell you that. Recent earthquakes in our city saw lots of large companies flounder with no offsite backups (tapes still next to servers) or unreadable backups. Generally 60 miles / 90 km is a good distance.
I don’t know your budget so giving advice is difficult. Budget does impact on choice of backup and storage. I have worked for a film producer providing I.T. support, so I have some understanding of the moving parts of your industry. There are a lot of unanswered questions:
What servers do you have, if any?
How many staff do you have?
Is this your one and only feature film?
What size is the largest file or file set?
What is the time between this film and the next? E.g. if you are full time producing you have the cash-flow to cover monthly expenses such as remote backup through fibre.
What sort of cash-flow will the film generate?
What requirements do you have moving forward?
These and other questions set your requirements, methodology and budget.
For example:
If you were producing 3 feature films a year and commercials every month employing a dozen staff, you could afford to have:
Servers with RAID backed up to RAID NAS onsite.
Dedicated fibre link (not that expensive) with 100mbit un-contended (not throttled by the ISP) link replicated to a data centre 60m/90k away. Important archive data should be written to tape or RDX and stored in data centre or tape vault.
Budget is your sole determining factor as to the degree of redundancy and backup you are able to afford.
Or if it's low budget, and income is from sales and the future is unknown, you may be considering TAPE, RDX or USB drives (not recommended) stored at home.
Present and future requirements, cashflow and budget, weighed against loss of data are your defining factors. I suggest that you employ a seasoned backup specialist and/or business analyst to work through the storage and backup process for you.