backing up edit
by Bernhard Pucher
on
May 28, 2008 at 8:00:10 am
Hi guys,
I'm about to embark on editing my first feature film and what I'd like to do is a weekly backup of my project with media files onto an external hard drive and a daily backups onto DVD or CDR, of the bins and timelines.
Any recommendations on how to structure it? Am I being excessive by doing daily backups?
Also a separate question,
Also, whats a good way to keep the media files of this project separate from the others projects i have on that machine? I was thinking about installing a new hard drive which I'd use exclusively for that project.
any recommendations which could make my life and my assistant editors life easier are more than welcome :)
Re: backing up edit by Michael Phillips on May 28, 2008 at 11:00:27 am
Certainly working off of a separate drive(s) will be the easiest way to manage the mediafiles themselves from other project media on the system. You can back up the media, to another set of drives but only do those incrementally as redoing all of the media would be redundant. I tend to be a little less stringent on my media backups. If my sources came from tape, I don't back those up as it is sometimes easier and faster to just recapture the missing material.
I do back up all imported and file based media twice - such as BWF, VFX, etc. Project and bins can be backed up daily. I just zip the whole folder and give it a date and time stamp.
Re: backing up edit by bouke vahl on May 29, 2008 at 8:32:41 am
I do agree an incremental backup of media is a good idea, Cheap firewire disks are great for this, and copying a day's worth of ingest in offline quality will take less than an hour.
But i would reccomend using a protected raid system for work.
I do NOT believe in not backing up media if it comes from tape.
Even if you have a good labeling system and not too many TC breaks/resets, it still can be a HUGE amount of work to redig.
I once did an offline on a cheap system, lost a firewire disk with 500 gig of DV (offline) material.
That took over a week to redig (It was 40 hours of footage...) A week not billable, a pissed client, stress, could have been avoided with a 200 buck backup drive.
(And nowadays with removable SATA disks it is way cheaper...)
Re: backing up edit by Jon Zanone on May 28, 2008 at 11:02:40 am
I think you'll spend more time backing up than editing.
If you have stable storage from a reputable company, I wouldn't worry too much about your media. You could possibly consolidate once a week to an external drive used ONLY for this project.
I would DEFINITELY save project files daily to a seperate drive (either a thumb or smaller USB hard drive). Put it in a folder, and develop a naming convention that makes sense to you. Keep ALL your daily project files in seperate folders.
You would do well to do a CD/DVD backup from your project archive file.
The bottom line is if you have access to your original media, you should be able to recover from whatever failure you run into.
Jon
"So you want to throw out the old you - but the old you is old enough to know it won't make it better"
Del Amitri - "Make it Better"
