Back-ups

Just curious how people are backing up their smoke.

Our tendency is to archive anything that we think might came back, and not everything we do. We've been talking about archiving the project.db files on a nightly basis, but am curious if there's enough info in there to rebuild a timeline.

This is about smoke on linux, but would be curious to hear if anyone is running Time Machine to back up smoke on mac.

I don't know whether you have a older 9400/9500 or the newer Z800 HP computer, but my suggestion is to buy a ESATA sled and install it in one of the empty slots in your computer, with a mounting point in LINuX. If you have phone support the people in Montreal can help you set-up a pathway. Once you've got it setup (hardware/software wise), you can slide in a 500GG or 1TB drive that you can buy online, format it for LINUX and archive away to that drive, and it writes and reads very fast. Admittedly, the drive formatting is a bit of a PITA, as it's not like clicking a software button like it is on a Mac.
I have also seen systems use an external sled and plug a drive into the rear USB port on the computer (I've been told the front usb2 port is slower), and archive that way, but it's painstakingly slow (read/write). I know LT04 tapes are also used, but I have no experience with Tape backups.
I even know a fellow "Smoker" that had his company buy a 12 or 24 TB Rourke Galaxy RAID (in addition to the RAID he uses for current job footage), that he uses as a "temporary" archive RAID. It seems an expensive way to go to me, and you wouldn't exactly want to use that for jobs that aren't coming back for a while IMHO.

I'd like to hear how others deal with Archiving/Restoring projects as well, as it has been my experience that it is something that is often overlooked by the non-technical people in Post Production, in that they're always wanting to put more work through a room (or rooms), but don't allow for time to Archive and/or Restore projects. Most likely because it's not directly billable, although I think it should be (maybe a line item cost of "storage" for future revisions of the clients work?

Well, that's my 2cents, as I have time to kill while commuting to my session. I'm getting "I-phone thumbs"
I have my fire retardant suite on, so flame away (pun intended). -TomT

PS. ARCHIVE EVERYTHING! The job you don't archive is always the one that will need an emergency revision!

There was a post last week on the Area blog for Flame that talks about archiving your work. I suggest grabbing the PDF. It's 8 pages and it's pretty good.

http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/stonedwired/raiders_of_the_lost_archive