Backing Up

I've mentioned it in this blog, but it's worth discussing again - we MUST back up. Since we're shooting in a tapeless format we don't automatically have a "back-up" of our footage. That was one major advantage of shooting on tape. Once you digitized your footage you now technically had two copies: your newly created Quicktime file and your tape. Maybe your plan is to buy new cards for every project, but this can get expensive. Spending $45 or so for a 16GB SDHC card can get pretty expensive when you're comparing it to a sub-$100 SATA drive that can hold a lot of backups. So eventually you'll be reusing those cards, deleting the camera original and existing, at least temporarily of course, in a world where there's only one copy of your footage.

I found out earlier that we can simply back up our cards to a drive and as long as we retain the file structure, and keep the Final Cut project file, we can resurrect that project via File and Transfer. Having to only back up the original AVCHD file structure means we can back up significantly more footage to drives compared to the Final Cut created Prores 422 files.

My back up procedure is finally in place. After I've backed up my cards to my internal SATA drive, I'll make a second back up copy. I'm buying fairly cheap Western Digital internal SATA drives and I'm plugging them in to an external SATA dock. The SATA dock plugs in to your computer either by an ESATA connection or USB2 (here's the one I own and it's worked great). The drive will appear on your desktop like any other external drive. Once the drive's full I'll eject the drive, put it in an anti-static bag and store it. It's important to note that most hard drive experts say you have to spin a drive at least once a year to avoid data loss, so if you have a To-Do list or use iCal, schedule yourself a reminder about 6 months from now to take out that particular drive and fire it up.

Now this gives me a couple of back ups of my material. It's also important to back up any other files you might have used like music, photos, graphics, and titles. If you want to be really paranoid about protecting your data, then you're probably going to have to go to the next step - offsite backups. What good is a back up if it's in your office and something happens to your office? You could potentially lose not only what's on your computer but also on the back up drive.

There are a number of options. You could simply double up your internal SATA orders, duplicate each drive and keep one in your office and one in off-site storage. I imagine you could also invest in a number of DVD-DLs, or buy a blu-ray burner and discs, and back up this way and keep that offsite somewhere. Or you could look at a service like Carbonite which with a fully paid subscription you can back up an unlimited amount of data. The back up process will take a long time, especially if you start with a pretty big legacy of material, but having your data backed up offsite can really add to some peace of mind.