long-term affordable archiving of af100 footage

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robcollins

Active member
I've recently completed a series of interviews (around 20 hours of video) for an educational institution. The edited video uses only a small fraction of the footage. I need to archive everything though in the institution's library and am considering how to reliably but affordably do this. I will make regular DVD's for preview, and am thinking of putting the original camera footage (with file structure intact) on this G-Tech drive formatted RAID 1.

Any better ideas? Thanks,
Rob
 
That is nothing more than 2 500GB drives in a little enclosure with a price premium...Your best best would be to buy two 1TB drives for less than half the cost, copy your data to each one, and keep them off-site somewhere (safety deposit box at the bank, safe, etc etc).
 
I know a lot of folks who use an ESATA external enclosure and bare eSATA 'internal' drives. Then they wrap them in an antistatic back and into a plastic box. Probably good for at least several years that way.

-Noah
 
I am charged with coming up with a solution for archiving all material I shoot for a museum. They want this footage to reside in a vault forever. (yeah, right). So to appease them for the next 1o years or so, I'm thinking of a DLT solution. My external drives at home are already filling up with these Private folders. Anyone have thoughts on DLT archive?
 
For most projects, I use 8GB cards and burn each to a DVD/DL. It isn't as ridiculous a proposition as with P2, since most full projects can fit on a single card.

Blu-Ray would be another good option.

I've also been toying with using decent cheap fast cards (a la Transcend Class 10) like tape - write once, duplicate to whatever, store indefinitely. I have a couple projects sitting in anti-static bagged SD's to test out the medium's endurance.
 
There are still "questions" concerning the longevity of Blu-ray disks. Those are still optical media and optical media has been showing some deterioration with time.

With conventional optical media (DVD, CD) used for still image storage there are recommendations to "refresh" the data by copying to a new disk annually or every two years.

My current solution (for AVCHD and Canon DSLR files) is a pair of 2TB external hard drives, with a third held in reserve to be moved in place if one of the pair shows any indication of problem. The external drives used for this are not left spinning, I switch them on only when I come back from a shoot and copy the original files on both, or when I need to "retrieve" something.
 
Thanks all. Yes, I'm concerned too about not just Blu-ray disks's longevity (I do have a burner) but also its fragility--susceptible to scratches, etc. Plus, at the moment most people don't have Blu-ray drives to read them. In my case, I'm looking for a solution that most likely can leave me out of it in the future--something so that someone who's not a tech guru can access the footage without my help. I'm not at all worried about the safety of the library--it's almost as good as a safe deposit box I think--plus, I will also of course keep a copy of the footage. What I like about the G-Tech drive is that it can be bus-powered, plus RAID 1, which I think makes it pretty unique. It has a great reputation, and I'm guessing that it has a good shot of the data being accessible in 20 years even if not powered on in that period. Am I crazy to think that? Since even if one drive or the controller/enclosure goes bad, the data should be retrievable on the other drive.

And by the way I love these drives for my own quick card-offloading--no AC needed, and the data is redundant. Worth the extra $ IMO.

So short of an affordable DLT solution, I'm still leaning that way.
 
Bruce Foreman said:
There are still "questions" concerning the longevity of Blu-ray disks. Those are still optical media and optical media has been showing some deterioration with time.

With conventional optical media (DVD, CD) used for still image storage there are recommendations to "refresh" the data by copying to a new disk annually or every two years.

My current solution (for AVCHD and Canon DSLR files) is a pair of 2TB external hard drives, with a third held in reserve to be moved in place if one of the pair shows any indication of problem. The external drives used for this are not left spinning, I switch them on only when I come back from a shoot and copy the original files on both, or when I need to "retrieve" something.
Click to expand...

There will always be "questions" regarding the longevity of any storage media. Spinner HDs are not infallible (as you suggest yourself by backing up your back up). If the point is to free up HD space instead of adding to the HD inventory Blue Ray discs are a viable alternative until the next big thing comes along (which won't be long).
 
We do what Noah stated. Each project gets a dedicated 1TB drive and when it's done and off to manufacturing, we pull the drive, wrap and pack it. I have drives from 7 years ago that still boot just fine but eventually everything goes bad. For filmed B-roll, we have a seperate external drive we copy clips from and every 12 months, we ghost to a new external and just keep leap frogging drives forever.
 
Phil1076 said:
That is nothing more than 2 500GB drives in a little enclosure with a price premium...Your best best would be to buy two 1TB drives for less than half the cost, copy your data to each one, and keep them off-site somewhere (safety deposit box at the bank, safe, etc etc).
Click to expand...

I use 2 (two) 1.5 TB WD drives (duplicate) for all my OG files. $109 each. A steal!
 
Agree, save the SD cards. Add the price of the cards to the client if possible.
Click to expand...

See Rick Burnett's explanation of why this isn't a great solution:

[SD cards will corrupt over time]
Because internally, NAND gates are used to store data in the SD cards (they are flash memory). Over time, the potential that is stored internally can leak out through a process called tunneling. Tunneling (also known as leakage) occurs in all CMOS electronics. It's the reason they draw power even when they are doing nothing (and with newer technology, leakage power gets worse and worse because gate oxide thicknesses keep shrinking).
Click to expand...
 
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