Where do you backup your footage to?

Abaddon

Abaddon

Well-known member
So you're done shooting a project and you wanna save the original footage that you shot on your P2 cards or firestore for future use. Where do you offload the data to for storage?
 
I use external hard drives to archive at the moment for my own stuff. For clients its up to what they want. Usually a portable external drive on set, as well as my Macbook Pro for on set backup. Then after days shoot, the client can opt for either burning backups himself, or i can take care of that as well. I also will keep a backup on HDD for all times sake in case of accidental deletion by the client. Free of charge of course for recorvery :P cuz im coo like dat
 
A job for a client is one thing. But if you're working on your own personal projects, hard drive space can run low real quick. I'm sure you could keep a closet full of external drives, but that's a bit much.


Any other solutions like blu-ray disks?
 
The cheapest solution I've found is to buy bare Sata drives http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148136.
Hook them up using a USB bridge converter and power supply.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1699339&sku=M501-1180
*NOTE* This is only for copying the MXF Files to for storage. You can not use this solution for editing. One of these drives will hold about 8 hours of DVCPro HD footage and about 20 hours of 24PN footage. That is a lot cheaper and will take up a lot less space in the closet than a box of DVCPro tapes.
 
ozduc said:
The cheapest solution I've found is to buy bare Sata drives http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148136.
Hook them up using a USB bridge converter and power supply.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1699339&sku=M501-1180
*NOTE* This is only for copying the MXF Files to for storage. You can not use this solution for editing. One of these drives will hold about 8 hours of DVCPro HD footage and about 20 hours of 24PN footage. That is a lot cheaper and will take up a lot less space in the closet than a box of DVCPro tapes.
Click to expand...


I may look into that.

Do you run into the same FAT32 problems when you transfer footage?
 
No file limitation whatsoever. Everything has been working fine so far (4 months going). I also keep a backup in regular 3.5 Hard disks. Iomega states 30 years shelf life for REV. I use the 3.5 HDD's for short medium therm archival, and the REV backup for long therm.

What I suggest is to actually have TWO Rev drives- one stored in mint condition, other working. Since the moving parts of the REV technology are on the Drive itself and not the disk. If the technology becomes obsolete, you'll always have something to make it available\ ready.
 
Abaddon said:
I may look into that.

Do you run into the same FAT32 problems when you transfer footage?
Click to expand...

Not sure what problems you are referring to, but I have about 2 TB of MXF files sitting on shelves right now and I've never had any problems with it. Clips range in length from a few seconds to over 2 hours (yes one continuous shoot). I just set up a master folder for each project with sub folders for each card, labeled with the intitials of the project followed by 001, 002 etc. Once each drive is full, I print a screen grab of the finder window showing all the project folders that are on the drive and I wrap that around the drive itself and place it back inside the plastic container it comes in and put it on the shelf. That way I can easily find footage, if I ever need to grab somehing.
 
ozduc said:
Not sure what problems you are referring to, but I have about 2 TB of MXF files sitting on shelves right now and I've never had any problems with it. Clips range in length from a few seconds to over 2 hours (yes one continuous shoot). I just set up a master folder for each project with sub folders for each card, labeled with the intitials of the project followed by 001, 002 etc. Once each drive is full, I print a screen grab of the finder window showing all the project folders that are on the drive and I wrap that around the drive itself and place it back inside the plastic container it comes in and put it on the shelf. That way I can easily find footage, if I ever need to grab somehing.
Click to expand...

So did you work on your projects directly from that drive?

I worked on my projects on one drive and then tried to tranfer the footage over to another but only 4GB can pass at a time.
 
Backups

Backups

I have three 500GB drives. One is the work drive (1)

Each FCP project has its own folder on the work drive (1),
which includes all my P2 files in the Capture Scratch folder.
From time to time, I back up an entire project from my work drive (1)
to a second drive (2) via an eSATA connection.

Every day or so, I take the second drive (2) to an offsite location,
swap it with the third drive (3), and bring the third drive back
to my workstation. Then I backup all recent projects to the
new backup drive (3).

So even if my house burned to the ground, I would still have a
copy of my work.

When my three 500GB drives are full, I'll buy three more drives.

Les
 
Abaddon said:
So did you work on your projects directly from that drive?

I worked on my projects on one drive and then tried to tranfer the footage over to another but only 4GB can pass at a time.
Click to expand...

NO! Those drives are like master tapes. They are just there for storage of the original MXF files. When I need to work with the files, I connect one of the storage drives to the computer and import the files into FCP, creating QT files. Those QT files are created on another drive which is my scratch disk. After I am done with a project I can delete the QT files off the scrath disk and retain the Project file. Should I ever need to go back I can just open the project, hook up the storage drive with the MXF files and re-import into FCP as QT files, same procedure you would use if they were tapes.
 
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