ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

5 years, 6 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

I'm not, but our insurance requires 3 geographically separate digital copies for precisely the reason you note - hard drives do fail. Tape is a good enough option as long as you verify the backups now and again - a backup isn't any use if it cannot be restored, after all. One obstacle is that it's much slower to back up several TB to tape :(

5 years, 6 months ago - Emma Baggott

Hi George. I use LTO tapes at work. If you have a big company and can have designated archivists or edit assistants then it's pretty simple. However, if it's just you and you're backing up a lot of footage - it is a very laborious chore! If you do decide to do it yourself, don't let what you need to to back up pile up, back up as you go - we're currently trying to back up 60TB and it's taking us months...

5 years, 6 months ago - George Brian Glennon

Hi Guys,

I would use a media company that will do this for me, for maybe 4TB of data. I overnight them a drive and they put the data on the tape and overnight back to me my drive with 2 tape copies. I can pay an additional fee to have them store a copy in their vault ($100. a year)

It might cost me about $350 US including the overnight or 2-day Fedex fees, which I think is not bad overall for all of the expense of a film. The tapes have to be stored properly meaning no magnetism or micro-wave proximity, and any humidity concerns.

If you think about it The Beatles original magnetic recording tapes from the early sixties have been used decades after the fact (with much care of course). I think major motion pictures are being archived on tape, If I'm not mistaken.

Also as Paddy says multiple cloned drives in different locations, always.

5 years, 6 months ago - Mark Brindle

Hi George
we have been using LTO tape for many years and find this works out the cheapest way and have not had problems getting data back from these. We are on LTO5 tapes right now and have moved from LTO3 a number of years ago. We are still keeping some Mac Pro machines running that have SAS cards that can connect to the LTO - we used to use SCSI cards. My background is originally in IT so am quite tech focused but if you can connect your machine to a drive then its pretty straightforward to backup and restore. We use BRU PD software on a mac which can search per tape only so we have to cut and paste each logged tapes data (hen we archive it) in to a spreadsheet to then allow us to search across multiple tapes but its not that much of a headache to do as were not backing up tapes every day. There will be other software that might let you search across your whole tape archive for a filename or keyword - so the better your record keeping the easier it is to find stuff again same as if you put it on hard drives or other media.

We also use RAID drives for projects and RAID drives for offload/DIT and RAID SSDs for actual post work. We used to do multiple copies too on hard drives but costs of tape are way lower even with the bigger 12T and 14TB drives out there now and LTO gives us complete assurance that the data is safe. So I would say if you can afford an LTO drive and good software and have a way to physically connect to it then go for it.

regards
Mark

5 years, 6 months ago - George Brian Glennon

Thanks for that Mark,

We're being more careful with archiving on drives now with the express purpose of being able to locate things in the future, once dumped to the data-tape.

Long term arching is something everyone in the creative industries has to look at. Music, Photography, Film.

It's relatively cheap insurance for expensive footage.