Archiving & Storing Video Projects
Here are some videos on archiving and storing all your files after a project is done.
Thu, 06/25/2009 - 14:13
Have you ever lost everything on your computer hard drive? Imagine losing all the great video you have shot. Archiving & storage is not something you think about every day, but it is something you need to deal with.
Video projects can chew up a lot of space on your hard drive. You can avoid that by getting in the habit of archiving all files related to your project on a DVD, or you can take advantage of an offsite archiving service, like iDrive-E.
What do you recommend as a good back-up 'regime'? Can older files still be accessed if, say, stored on an external HD?
Yes, backing up to an external drive is a good way to go.
As of FlipShare 4.5, you can re-import backed up files back into your FlipShare library. (Even more exciting: In FlipShare 5.0, you'll be able to import footage and photos from other cameras into your FlipShare libary.)
You can also move your library to another drive, other than the system drive, which is a good thing to do to keep your system drive from filling up or fragmenting. Again, this is a feature introduced in FlipShare 4.5, so do watch this video, if you haven't already.
Backing up media files is a problem, for a variety of reasons.
First, of course, is that they are so large -- especially HD media. Also, however, a real backup scheme should be offsite, so that if your house burns down, or is damaged, or something else of that sort, your backups can be gone. Also, it turns out that CD/DVD media aren't really that robust -- especially the ones you make at home. And we all know that hard disks can crash.
I'm attracted, generally, to the idea of background network backup services like Mozy and IDrive-E that backup the files/directories you specify to their own servers, when your computer is idle. The trouble is that media files are so big they take forever to backup, and if you need to recover them, that will take forever, too.
I'm thinking that SD media may actually get cheap enough to become a solution. They turn out to be very rugged, very small, and the price/gigabyte of storage is dropping regularly. You could stack terabytes of media in a small fireproof box. Make sure that you number them, though, and that the first one contains a continually updated index to where everything is. (I've been looking for a good piece of media management software -- ideally free, or very cheap, to perform this task.)
All that said, what is the guarantee that the media you store today will be readable by tomorrow's media devices? There are those who argue that we are going to have to lose our value for permanence.