Put the tape in a box and store it on a shelf. Save the logs and project files. If we were really fastidious we'd be cloning the tapes.

We never need anything older than 8 years and the tapes seem to be holding up for that long.

This is not a "forever" solution. Don't know what my employer is doing for the feature length docs but they should have a 100 year plan. After all, they sometimes use archival footage that's 70-80 years old so 100 years isn't unreasonable.

Rob Mack

Thecus have a NAS that holds 7 drives for less than a king's ransom.
LTO tape seems to have become the industries defacto standard for long term archiving.

Any digital video tape is also a good option especially Digital Betacam, heck it's nigh impossible to erase intentionally.

Analogue tape was/is a nightmare. Locally several king's ransoms were spent dubbing 2" quad to 1" to SP to DB. Image quality ended up worse than bad VHS. Cutting out a one or more analogue generations makes the world of difference. Thankfully a few 2" machines are still running, keeping them running is a task.

Bob.

If I can hijack a small portion of this thread (instead of starting a whole new one), I have a question about WHAT content you guys typically save after a project is done.

For instance, my first wedding project folder contains sub folders that contain all original footage, photos, .veg, .sfk files, etc. Then I have 4 separate .veg projects with proper renders of each section in high quality intermediate. Then there is a final .veg project containing the 4 intermediates rendered for various targets. (DVD, net, SD, HD, etc) I may not be talking the proper lingo here, but you (hopefully) get the idea.

So once the final output is done and delivered to the customer, how much of all that intermediate work is really necessary to keep around? I would assume only the original files and the finished renders are all thats needed correct? I get the feeling that I will be told that I should just keep everything, but conserving space is critical. The one project with everything as it sits is 89gb. I guess this is where tape can be somewhat convenient in that its automatically storable and I don't need to crowd the computer.
(By the way, I am flirting with disaster and keeping everything on our only family computer with ONE drive and just backing everything up on an external drive. It's hard getting started from nothing.)

I'm just looking for some guidance to proper and smart workflow/saving.

Thanks.

Thanks for the responses folks, pretty interesting.

To address Brad C, my work flow sounds similar to yours. A master project folder and everything goes into sub directories of that folder. Veg's, graphics, media, renders, audio - everything. I then copy that folder onto another drive for back up. When I work on the project the next day I move the old back up into a sub folder marked.... you guessed it - "old back up" - and then copy over the updated project to the back up folder.

This means that I have 3 complete versions of the project, one version a day or so behind for safety. This of course can take up a huge amount of space. When I'm done with the project I move the final folder to the back up, nuke the old back up and depending on space nuke the project from my system media drive.

I try and keep the project on my system for as long as I can because their always seems to be some kind of change order a week or two after they have given final approval. I'm happy to charge em' for it and they are happy I can do it fast.

I also like to keep EVERYTHING backed up because it just makes my life easier. If I have to update something six months or a year later I can just open the project and do it - I'm not digging through tapes or trying to re-capture. The downside is it does eat up a bunch of space. The upside is hard drives are cheap.

50 to 100 gigs is about right for many projects. I try and keep stuff for 3 years, stuff I like I seem to hold onto for a while. My one rule is never delete anything while you are working. 99% percent of the time this is ridiculous but it's that 1%, in the heat of battle at 3am where it really pays off :)

My workflow is similar to Yoyodyne's with the exception that, unless it's a short project (under 15 min.), I don't bother to back up the video files as I'm pretty good at labeling and storing tapes.
Everything else does though, including VidCap files.
I do a lot of batch capturing and have found that saving these (and giving them proper names) makes it much easier when I have to re-do a project.
A recent example was an 3 hr. instructional video that was done a few years ago.
A department (I work at a community college) changed their name & logo and requested that I re-do the video to reflect these minor changes (sheesh!!).
I loaded the VidCap files, recaptured the tapes, loaded the veg files and remastered the project.

Mike