(Article) NFS: 3-2-1 Backup Strategy to Protect All of Your Footage

set wrote on 12/31/2016, 10:36 AM

Show me a filmmaker and I'll show you a person who has lost precious footage due to poor archiving.

Data storage: it's not the sexiest filmmaking topic in the world, but it is an important one, because most filmmakers have gone through the utter devastation of losing much needed shots, scenes, or even entire projects due to mishandling, data corruption, act of god, or a dirty, dirty thief. Losing your data can be a nightmare, but David Bergman of Adorama shows you a way to safeguard it using the "3-2-1" backup strategy.

Read here for more:

http://nofilmschool.com/2016/12/try-3-2-1-backup-strategy-protect-all-your-footage-0

Comments

Former user wrote on 12/31/2016, 10:46 AM

This also brings up the question, which is safer., harddrive or the original digital drive. (SD Card, CF card, etc). How long will the digital storage memory last compared to a spinning harddrive?

Red Prince wrote on 12/31/2016, 11:20 AM

This also brings up the question, which is safer., harddrive or the original digital drive. (SD Card, CF card, etc). How long will the digital storage memory last compared to a spinning harddrive?

I’d say the safest thing is to burn it all to a BD (Blu-ray disc). I mean as data. The BD was designed to last for a long time (unlike a DVD, where a scratch can destroy its contents).

The one disadvantage of BD is that I hate to waste a BD on just a little data, so I have to wait till I have enough to fill up a whole BD before burning it in.

That said, historically film proved to be a medium that can be preserved for a very long time. On the other hand, digital data can be copied without any loss of data.

The things I worry about most is the proliferation of file formats and newer computers being unable to open older file formats. Unless a file format is well documented (and the documentation is available to anyone for free), your files are sitting ducks.

ushere wrote on 1/4/2017, 3:56 AM

a few years ago i was talking with a friend of mine who was head of x-ray and imaging at a major hospital. for years and years film had been stored in the basement of the hospital, so much so that it was overflowing and proving a hazard in many more ways. all the big players were called in (ibm, hp, dell, etc., along with m$). they all had varying but similar solutions; hard-drive or cloud. my friend asked could they guarantee it's retrieval in a. a 100 years, b. in 25 minutes. none of them could give a cast iron guarantee. suffice to say the archive was transferred to microfiche which gave them almost instant access and unlimited retrieval for the foreseeable future, and required no proprietary technology or indeed, power supply....

i wouldn't have opted for bd*, preferring a couple of hd's stored in different locations.

*over the years i've had many more cd/dvd drives go bad on me than hard drives. that said, i've also have branded dvd media become unreadable after 10 years where as i can still read txt documents and mp1 files from a 30mb drive from the early 90's.

oh, and let's not forget the deadly click of the zip drive:-(

NickHope wrote on 1/4/2017, 5:15 AM

One thing I think is very important with HDD backups is to keep some old backups for various durations (e.g. a very recent backup, one from 6 months ago, one from a year ago, and one from 5 years ago). It's so easy for some rarely-used files to go bad for whatever reason, and then to merrily copy the bad files across all your multiple backups.

I experienced this in the past week. In the middle of a major data reorganisation I found a load of videos were showing 0 file size, and some other videos and photos were showing full file size but couldn't be played. And I'd unkowningly copied these files across my 2 most recent backups. Thankfully all but 4 of the corrupt files were on a backup I still had from a year ago. I'm still not sure what caused the corrupt files. I have a list of 5 possible causes. The symptoms seem to be of a hard drive going bad, but I don't know which one.

I'm someone must have written a fancier backup strategy that covers not only storing backups in different locations, but how long to keep various backups, and how to rotate various backup drives so you're best covered. I'd love to make my procedure less random.

WayneW wrote on 1/4/2017, 6:33 AM

I have several years of audiovisual archiving experience and there are a few comments I can make in terms of backups:

1) Follow the LOCKSS (lots of copies keeps stuff safe) principle. (This principle has even been used to develop a project of the same name by Stanford University. It is an interesting project and could potentially solve many of the issues relating to preservation of rare and/or endangered material, although it does require the copyright holders to give up some rights in respect of their intellectual property. I highly recommend that anyone interested in preservation of national heritage should read up on it, as it relies on peer to peer sharing with CRC hashing to ensure integrity, as well as format migration planning among other things.)

2) Take any and all manufacturer claims of longevity with a huge pinch of salt and perform regular tests to verify integrity. I recall back in the nineties CD-R manufacturers were claiming lifespans of 30-100 years, yet we started picking up block error rates outside of acceptable levels after about 3 years on discs that were stored in optimal conditions (dark room at consistent 18°C and 30%RH). This was on so-called "archival grade" discs that were supposed to have a lifespan in excess of 100 years.

3) Don't put all your eggs in one basket. This leads from the first two comments. Don't choose one carrier and/or container format and rely on only that format, as you are sure to be disappointed. Keep the original on a NAS or similar type of storage and make CRC hashed copies to off-site hard drives, cloud servers, BD-R, DVD-R and whatever other storage media you have at your disposal. Yes, cost is always a limiting factor, but everyone can make some arrangement and put a disaster strategy in place.