Best back-up method?

evolvnyc

evolvnyc

Well-known member
So I've logged 60 hours of mostly irreplacable docu footage... I can't afford a deck but I have a badass G4 so is the most economical/standard method of backing (with no loss in quality) to burn dvds or are there other options? Any advice appreciated.
 
you lose some quality on DVD (mpeg2) . what you could do is capture it and burn the raw footage onto data DVD's... its a lot of DVD's though...
 
A few external hard drives is also an option. 60 hours at 11 GB/hour is 2 or 3 300 GB drives.
 
What I did was find a friend with a ton of extra harddrive space and I sent all the extra stuff to him. The only extra thing I can think of is buy an external harddrive. You could burn the .avi files to a data DVD, but this would take a lot of DVDs.
 
60 hours = 720GB

60 tapes @ $4 (??) = $240 60 tapes @$5 = $300

720GB -> $600 in hard drives

So it depends on your workflow, whether you anticipate ever needing this backup, where and how you want to store it all, whether it is all on-line already.

I have a 2 bay firewire drive with swappable disks. You can buy 4 bay also. Capture your footage, then pull drive drives and save them. Footage is always available to edit, and you send the tapes somewhere else as your backup. But anything you delete from drives is potentially lost if something happens to tapes.

To go to DVD you need about 200 DVD's if you record it as AVI's. This would be cheapest at maybe $75, but would take a LONG time and I don't know of a program to manage the process for you. So you have to sit there and swap each DVD, label it with filenames AND content, and make sure you don't skip anything.

I guess that space needs are about the same for all three, but if its critical (safe deposit box?) you better measure dimensions and think about heat/humidity issues..
 
when you're talking 60 tapes of footage.. there isn't really an easy way of backing it up. anything is going to be expensive and time consuming...
 
This is nuts, do you know how long it would take to burn all those data dvd's? Better yet, do you know how long it will take to edit 60 hours of footage?(@six months) Save the time for the editing and back your stuff on a couple of 400 gig drives(@$600) which should take a half day and get started on the editing cause to make a good documentary you will have to start with a good workflow and if you waste all that time to save a little money you will feel like you are behind and need to play catch up and this leads to bad craftsmanship! If you don't have the money then you have no choice. On second thought, are you logging and capturing? If you log all tapes and something happens to the media, you can re-capture because your editing program knows all the in-out points. Laborious but the cheapest way to go. I know FCP can do this but don't know about others.
 
geno: yes i will be using fcp, so would you be suggetsing logging as i review all the footage and just download it and store it to ex. hard drive as i go, thus killing 2 with one as it were?
thanks!
 
you will have to log eventually. fcp is awesome in terms of being able to retrieve your footage. You could even do an offline edit if you don't have enough hard drive space, make a rough cut with all the transitions and such, and than do an online edit.

but it sounds like you want full resolution. I agree with geno, the labor involved with making tape or dvd copies is way too much. mini-dv would be real time copies (60 hours plus with no logging).

update: i've log and captured footage at full resolution and made copies of the fcp file and all captured footage to a third hard drive before: granted I didn't have 60 hours of footage, but it can be done (that would make for 3 copies). I would only do this if you were paranoid about losing your footage, but its kinda overkill.
 
Yes, definatly go with the HD, you will save yourself so much time. Oh, and by the way, if you went to DVD, you shouldn't be making mpeg2 files, you should just capture in 4GB chunks and save the AVI file. but that would take hundreds of DVDs and lots of time. Get an external enclosure, and a whole bunch of HD's and then just swap em in and out. Also, if I were you, I would be logging all of the good footage now. It takes a little longer, but in the long run it will save you time, and money in storage. Just take all the good stuff, or even remotely good stuff, and then get a safedeposit box at your bank and keep the DV tapes there. Also, don't use your DVX to log the tapes, get a deck or a cheap DV camera.
 
Buy some HD's. They don't need to be external -- just open the case and plug them in to whatever IDE cable is free (you may have to jumper the drive).

Then copy everything to the HD, yank it, and put it in storage. Fast, cheap, and will last for a VERY long time -- much longer than tapes or DVD.

I buy a new HD (or two) whenever I start a new project, and use that as the project drive. As the project ends, I copy the master files to the new project drive (in case I need to make minor adjustments), and yank the current drive to put in storage. This way I'm always working with a new drive (which is bigger and faster than the last!), and stuff gets archived three times without having to think about it (original DV tape, project HD, and on new project HD). Plus I burn CDROMs of artwork, documentation and audio, and project files (minus video) as I go in case there's a major crash in the middle of a project.

When I need to go back to an old project, I simply put in the old archived drive, and there's all my work, exactly as I left it. Very convenient.
 
Consider enterprise data tape drive (like Sony AIT-2)

Consider enterprise data tape drive (like Sony AIT-2)

I'm going to offer a completely different approach:

Copy the data files (.avi) onto an enterprise-grade tape archival system...

You can get some great Sony AIT-2 tape drives (data tape for enterprise archival use, not DV tape) with necessary SCSI cards for circa $500 from eBay (either used or new depending upon how good a deal you find). Tapes are $30-35 each.

These tapes will hold 140 Gb of data (compressed or 50Gb native) on one small tape (around the same size as DV tape).

So, that's 12 hours of native footage per tape. Make two copies just to guard against loss. I firmly believe that storage of this type of tape in good environment (constant temperature, low humidity, etc.) will last far longer than removable hard drives, and is far more efficient than DVD's for larger data sets.

Also, very easy to integrate into your workflow, and pretty cheap...

Hope this helps.
 
will there be any difference in quality if i use a deck or a cheap dv camera to log and download footage? hard drives seem the way to go, but i worry about leaving them to site for a year and not be used, it seems un-solid somehow...
 
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