Back in the ‘old days’ when you had finished editing the film you’d shot, it was stored in metal cans on a shelf. When videotape took over, the tapes were stored in large plastic cases.
Whilst one of the proposed advantages of videotape was that it could be re-used, often it wasn’t because of the risk of drop outs and so the amount of physical storage needed grew and grew.
Digital Media
Whilst storage of data in the digital world takes up a lot less space (probably 90% less or more), there are still issues about how it’s stored. In the days of film, you needed to keep the footage away from dust, heat and humidity. Whilst the plastic cases holding videotapes generally kept the dust and humidity out, you still have to ensure the tapes weren’t exposed to heat. (and now, 40 years after videotape was first introduced, we’re finding it’s not as stable a medium as we once thought.)
Now that we’re in the digital world we have new issues to manage. Murphy’s Law says that there are two types of people in the digital storage world – those who have had a hard drive crash and those who will. It’s prudent to be aware of this possibility and have a data management system in place to minimise any disasters.
Data Management
Whilst I’ve had two hard drive failures in the eleven years I’ve been running my own video production business, I’ve not lost any data – yet! Here’s the steps I take after each shoot:
Copy the data from the camera card to two places; an archive drive and a working drive.
When I ingest the card data for editing, I do this onto a third drive. (NLE programs allows you to configure where the capture folder is located.) So at this point I have the data in three places (or four, depending on how quickly I re-use the camera card).
At various stages during the editing process I export the timeline as a Quicktime file in Pro Res 422 calling it Draft 1, Draft 2, etc. This means I have a hi-res version of each draft. I also upload a web version of these drafts to You Tube as an unlisted file. Whilst this is not hi-res, it becomes a reference file if the unthinkable happens and I lose the drive I am working on. (The autosave function has also saved me in the past when I have lost the project file)
I have a range of data recovery software which in the two failures above, I have used to re-build my drive. The one I have used the most is VirtualLab Data Recovery. It’s brilliant. Whilst there are costs involved (around $100), when you lose a drive, cost becomes irrelevant.
So although we’re no longer concerned about dust contaminating our film image and humidity and temperature are nowhere near the problem they used to be, you still need to manage your data storage. The good thing is that no longer do you need racks and racks of shelving for film or videotape containers.
Oh, it’s good to see that my hunches were correct. I’ve been afraid that I’m a little paranoid, because I’ve been thinking about buying two or three drives for backup purposes, so it’s good to see that someone with more experience than me has those instincts!
Thanks Emily – the challenge then of course is to make sure you stick to your routine of doimg backups.
Oh, interesting! Could you share what sort of storage devices you use? I’d be interested in seeing what those are.
Hi. I have found the cheapest and most reliable solution is a 1TB or 2TB USB external drive. I buy them as I need them and have almost 40 currently. This goes back 10 years or more. I have considered a NAS system (Network Attached Storage) but these have their own problems. Individual drives seem to work the best for me. Hope that helps.
Man after my own heart! Always double and triple back up everything, usually on Dropbox, and two separate drives. I’ve also got a thumb drive on my keychain to make last-minute backups, because I never know when I’m going to need that. Glad to see someone else shares the same POV. Loving the blog, man!
Thanks for the comment.
Backup situations are interesting. I prefer cloud-based services like Dropbox for most of my backups, but I do keep a single physical drive to keep things on. The cloud-base services mean less clutter in my little home office, haha!
Do you have experience working with cloud-based backups?
Hi Peggy Sue. Good thinking, but cloud backups need fast internet, given the size of video files. Alas, our networks here in Australia are not the quickest which means cloud back up can take days ….