Hi. If anyone knows of a Philip Bloom blog where he talks about backup I couldn't find it... I'm a bit overwhelmed on the whole back up thing. So far my films have mostly been very short and for learning experiences but I'm about to get more serious. I'm going to spend the rest of the year making short films full time... First step I thought of doing was was buying three external hard drives for proper backup. I assume I then use one of these as my scratch disk? I thought I would buy three Western Digital hard drives? What do I look for? Do I simply buy the latest ones with FW800? My laptop has thunderbolt. Is that useful? I know this is newby stuff but I don't have a technical brain. Thanks for any help!
Hej there. Welcome. Well, you can go along with buying three WD Hard drives. sure that works. It is quite some job to keep all three drives (if you are in for triple redundancy) in sync. It takes time and can get quite annoying. My setup is as follows: At home: Internal harddives Several external Harddives A drobo with 4TB I use the external hard drives for editing the projects I am working on I use one external drive for a backup I use the drobo for the source clips and the finished projects (which I also have on one archive external disk) At work in a documentary production company: we used external LaCies for a long time. That was a mess. But now I have switched over to a set of Promise SmartStore 4600n. They work fine - are fast enough to edit from and are a peace of mind. Take a look at those.. But still - the best backup are double redundancy at different places on disks that are not connected to the computer full time.
You could also just get a RAID 5 system with 8TB which would give you 6TB of useable space, then when a project it complete archive it to an Archive HD or two if you want.
Thanks for your replies. I think I will just buy three external hard drives and start from there. It's obvious that everyone has a different system for backup etc.
Just found a very helpful article on storage for newbs if anyone's interested: http://www.videoguys.com/Guide/C/Vi...e FAQ/0xc0dc681654a5dba55ca08f303a6c38df.aspx
This article is übber cool for newbies. I'll add, if you wanna buy three external HDD, buy Thunderbolt ones that you can daisychain. That way, it would be a bit easier to make every disk in sync.
One of the trueisms of archiving (as opposed to backup) is the 'Three Two One' rule. Three copies, in Two formats, One copy stored off-site. To misquote Dirty Harry, archive strategies should be like butt-holes (in that everyone has one), so to add one more to the mix based on my need to edit on-site for corporate gigs: Copying rushes and editing onto bus powered USB3 drive, that gets duplicated/cloned onto bus powered FW800 drive throughout the project, then a 'Media Managed' copy onto BluRay when I get home. Client gets either BluRay or USB3 drive which becomes my off-site copy or I transfer onto a bare drive using the USB3 or eSATA 'Toasters'. I've had an absolute female dog of a time with LTO. A client uses it to archive their video assets, and I dread going round and extracting from LTO. It's painfully slow, it is in my experience unreliable (a few times now, a segment of a long record goes flop-bott, and the whole thing is toast), and it's a major camera sized chunk of money for a big box that is as exciting as sand. And that will be extremely hard to recoup in terms of investment (assuming you have an alternative strategy of course). PS: As a Mac user, I'm a great fan of the CalDigit USB3 PCIe card. WD USB3s are twice as fast as FW800s according to BlackMagic's test app. Thunderbolt may be good someday, but right now...
This is my set up as well. But its still not fool-proof. I was running a OWC 6TB array that is controlled via Hardware RAID 5 and It worked flawlessly for a year then out of no where the board took a dumb on me. The drives were ok but I couldn't access them. Luckily OWC was able to recover all my data. (Worst two weeks of my life) Now I'm running the OWC 6TB RAID 5 array as the main and a 6TB G-Tech G-RAID as the backup to the OWC array. But when I first started I just bought a cheap 2 Bay Hard drive dock and just use regular drives in RAID 1 (Mirror). But Apples Software RAID is so unreliable I literally didn't sleep well at night while I was exporting something because I was afraid something was going to go wrong. And many times it did. Thats why I went to Hardware RAID's.
