Shooting digital stills and video? Backup!

Many an article and post written on this topic, but after today I thought I would just add my thoughts to this.

Now that we are shooting stills and video straight to disc there is no tape or film to fall back on, we have to be organised and backup and archive.

The difference?

Backups
Our back up is relevant to our live projects and is in two forms, an hourly occurrence of our working files and at time of ingestion we back up all our digital image and vision files.

Archiving
Our archiving process, this is our chance to consolidate projects and remove them from the system, they are moved onto two external drives, one kept in the studio for ready access and the other drive offsite in case of the worst.

Does it take long, yes and no, the majority of the process occurs in the background and allows me to work over the top of it, albeit with a hit to performance of the system. The copy process takes a while, identifying what to copy, pretty quick and easy.

Quantity
Well the thing that prompted me to write this today was the fact that I am moving over 1TB of data around, archiving jobs off the system and backing up vision from a shoot. How often do I move this quantity, probably monthly, high definition video takes up a huge amount of disc space. How many drives, sitting next to me are over 30 drives, giving around 40-50TB of storage, this is then duplicated offsite as well.

Where to
We decided on using an external Hard Drive solution, whilst it may not have the benefits of tape it does have other key benefits,
simplicity of implementation;
ease of use;
data is available by simply plugging in the drive;

For us this last point was the winner, for us being able to access material quickly is critical, clients will often call asking for a job to be accessed, for any number of reasons, and for it to be turned around quickly. In reality even if they were not asking for it quickly the fact that the jobs are on hard discs reduces the amount of time it takes for us to reinstate a project making better use of out time.

Is this system infallible?
NO, NO, NO, hard drives will fail, note that I said will, that they do is not questionable, it is a matter of when not if. This is an additional reason for the offsite drive, when the drive in the studio eventually does fail we will bring in the offsite and make another two copies immediately, discarding the second drive.

Cost effective?
Yes it is, now, when we were tape based for video, no it was not, but then all vision was backed up on the original tape anyway.

The future
As network speeds and capacities increase and costs reduce I will move the backup and archiving to a cloud solution, this is already a viable option for the average home user with a few GB to look after, but the video that we now all shoot to disc based cameras, well that will still be a couple of years away.