Long road trip documentary file storage?

M

Muskoka

Member
In March of 2015 I am going to be going on the road for 10 weeks shooting a documentary, traveling from Toronto, across the southern US, up the west coast and then across Canada back to Toronto.

I'm planning to dump my cards daily into some sort of external storage with redundancy and am looking for suggestions. I am considering something like a LaCie 8TB RAID 1 which should afford me plenty of storage and provide a redundant mirror of all of my audio and video files.

Does anyone have other or better suggestions?
 
I don't like RAIDs that much for travelling.
If you crash something physically, you're gonna be very pi...

I like to have two separate storage areas. I use 2,5" portable
drives. I like the Lacie rugged very much, but you can use
all in the end.

Important for me:
- 1 drive is stored in my room
- other drive is stored in the room of another person

If my room is gonna be robbed or whatever happens or if I
crash one of the drives.
Voila: The other drive is still save with another person.

I backup footage on the first dirve, then exchange the drives
with my colleague and backup to the 2nd drive.

You can do this with 3 drives, if you want and sent the drive
home in the middle of your trip. That's what I do on longer trips.

These small 2,5" drives don't need external power, are small, rugged
and you have more a more secure solution than with a RAID.

RAID is not meant for backup - it's meant for redundancy on one area.
 
Better solution would be an LTO tape drive, but they are expensive. I am pretty sure someone makes a USB3 version, it's like $3k new though.
 
I don't think this is a practical solution for long trips...

I'm doing trips all over the world since 15 years now. I never lost a frame (knock on wood!).
Besides being small, cheap and easy to work with, I always had both drives brought home
safely.

We brought 2x big Lacie RAIDs for a bigger project last year - one of the RAIDs died...

It also depends highly on how much footage you will produce and your bitrate and storage
media, too. When I go shootong with my good'ol FS100 (24 MBit in 1080/25p), I bring
card storage for 8hs continous shooting without the need of extra storage. And I can even
use the FSU128 on the camera for automatic 2 storage recording on set.
I did this several times, when bringing computers and drives was just not an option.
 
Erik Wittbusch said:
I don't like RAIDs that much for travelling.
If you crash something physically, you're gonna be very pi...

I like to have two separate storage areas. I use 2,5" portable
drives. I like the Lacie rugged very much, but you can use
all in the end.

Important for me:
- 1 drive is stored in my room
- other drive is stored in the room of another person

If my room is gonna be robbed or whatever happens or if I
crash one of the drives.
Voila: The other drive is still save with another person.

I backup footage on the first dirve, then exchange the drives
with my colleague and backup to the 2nd drive.

You can do this with 3 drives, if you want and sent the drive
home in the middle of your trip. That's what I do on longer trips.

These small 2,5" drives don't need external power, are small, rugged
and you have more a more secure solution than with a RAID.

RAID is not meant for backup - it's meant for redundancy on one area.
Click to expand...

+1

And don't put too much faith in Hotel room's safes either.
 
Erik Wittbusch said:
I don't like RAIDs that much for travelling.
If you crash something physically, you're gonna be very pi...

I like to have two separate storage areas. I use 2,5" portable
drives. I like the Lacie rugged very much, but you can use
all in the end.

Important for me:
- 1 drive is stored in my room
- other drive is stored in the room of another person

If my room is gonna be robbed or whatever happens or if I
crash one of the drives.
Voila: The other drive is still save with another person.

I backup footage on the first dirve, then exchange the drives
with my colleague and backup to the 2nd drive.

You can do this with 3 drives, if you want and sent the drive
home in the middle of your trip. That's what I do on longer trips.

These small 2,5" drives don't need external power, are small, rugged
and you have more a more secure solution than with a RAID.

RAID is not meant for backup - it's meant for redundancy on one area.
Click to expand...

my system as well. western digital and seagate have 2tb 2.5"ers on sale frequently for 80 bucks each
 
Basic concepts for keeping your data alive is multiple copies in multiple locations so any single catastrophic event doesn't take all the data. Multiple drives. Multiple places. If you have four drives, but they're all in your backpack and that gets stolen, then redundancy is worthless. Split 'em up! Send one home.
Keep it easy and cheap so you actually use it. Dragging an LTO all over the world isn't practical. Having three or four of those little drives being shuttled around and sent home is fairly easy.
Another thing to consider is cloud storage, but realistically it's not always practical due to the size of the files and the availability of really fast internet.
Couple more things to keep in mind...
-Cars get broken into. A lot. Especially with out of state plates and even more so if it looks like there's a bag in there.
-Hotels aren't completely secure either. If you're going to leave your camera or any gear in the room and go out, put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. Best to not have the housekeepers know what you've got in the room and best to keep a potential thief guessing if someone's really in the room or not. You can always swap towels at the front desk if you need to.
-Have fun. Enjoy the trip.
 
I agree with Erik and Andrius. Though I am not a fan of exceptionally large drives as I feel that if you lose one you have lost everything. I usually use 500 gb 2.5 inch drives two at a time. I fill them up to about 75% and that's it on to two more of the same. I shoot with a Ninja and SDXC cards in my FS100 and I back up the cards on a NEXTO as well. It is handy to have in the field and gives you that one more layer of backup. My PMW 300 uses SDXC with adapter cards and I do the same with the NEXTO but when I use XAVC cards it will be different.
 
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It's funny in retrospect that I actually even questioned my options as, working on the road as a still photographer (though admittedly for much shorter periods of time, and the files don't take up NEARLY the same kind of space), I always transfer my files to an external drive (LaCie rugged drives typically) and keep a copy on my laptop. I think I was leaning toward a RAID solution simply because of the sheer volume of files that I'm going to be backing up, shooting every day over the course of the 10 week trip.

LaCie Rugged 2TB Thunderbolt drives are around $280, so two or three of those should get me through along with picking up a less expensive 'shuttle' drive every week or so on the road to ship home seems like my best bet. When I get home at the end of the trip I'll be able to transfer everything onto my RAID when I'm ready to start editing.

Thanks everyone.
 
I have done 15 days of travel at a time shooting (often with 2 cameras) everyday.
As mentioned above: 2 drives. After the first 2 drives fill up, use another 2 drives (label them - it will get confusing fairly quickly). Then when you return home you put those drives in your carry on in case the baggage handler had sticky hands.
 
2x 2TB Western Digital Hard drives is how I roll
Put one in a pelican case and the other in your suitcase.
I'd want to have a pelican case for every one of my drives if it were practical.
Also sending one of those drives home halfway through your trip is brilliant.
Even if all of your footage gets lost in some catastrophe you have half of what you shot safe at home . 1/2 is better than nothing.
 
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