Re: Backup strategy for your SAN ?

Chrispy,

Good to find you here.

I tend to agree that video, your original 'data', if off tapes can always be recaptured. That being said, if its a PAL film project with the average 50-100 hours of material, an equal quantity of BWF files, sub clips and FCP's fantastic inability to relink 24fps conformed clips. Recapture is not always an option.

Then there's tapeless media - AVCHD, XDCamEx, Red, Phantom, etc etc.

But most of this backups are really short term backups. Once the program is edited, the value of the original unedited media diminishes over time.

For my film DI clients, I advice a bunch of Firewire drives. If you're really paranoid, do a simultaneous backup to LTO3 - one reel per tape. In the worst case, the film is always there. Can be rescanned.

With LTOs, my observation is they're not like hard drives. You need to have the software that wrote it, just to read them. So, a Bru backup, needs Bru to restore. Retrospect needs retrospect and so on. Windows Backup (its a software built in to Windows) seems to be common across Windows systems.

Some tape libraries don't normally work like a cupboard full of drives but like a giant volume which is the sum of all LTO tape cassettes in them. So, if you need a particular file, they can get it. but only the software knows which tape or tapes it is in. You can't just write to a Library and then pull out one or more tapes and keep them away.

So unless the world comes up with a storage device that's as long lasting as film, video tape, and hard disk - in that order - we're going to pretty much take our chances with storage. Or, get two of them of two different makes... and still take our chances.

Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com

FCP Editor, Mumbai, India.
Completely PAL.