RAID? Backup workflow? Harddrive strategy?

[Jeroen Wolf]

I seriously need to organize my media and I'm looking into a few different scenarios.

I'm curious what workflows people have as far as editing and backup is concerned. Particularly the one man band houses.

I'm looking to buy a RAID 5 system to edit off and I'm very interested in the OWC Thunderbay 4 system. If I buy 12 TB I will only have 6TB of storage space and I can see that filling up quite easily.

So what shall I do? Buy cheap (slow) drives purely for archiving of old projects? I have a cheap 4TB external drive that I use as backup. Media that's really important I back up once (2 copies), sometimes twice (3 copies). Archiving old projects from clients I save for 2 years but do not backup. Only once or twice in 10 years have I needed footage from projects I finished.

I can't backup everything in a RAID system, it's too expensive. But I can archive on a new internal disk (through a docking station) once in a while.

What kind of strategy and workflow have you guys developed?

[Nate Haustein]

You should get 9TB out of a 12TB raid enclosure. Buy 4TB drives and you'll have 12TB to work with using RAID5.

I've found those little USB3 drive "toasters" to be useful. I buy slow, large capacity bare drives for backups and then store them in plastic hard drive cases.

[Jeroen Wolf]

Thanks, Nate. So do you keep 2 copies of everything you've shot? Some people say it's not truly backed up unless you have 3 copies... (one of them stored away from your own house/office)

And do you have a routine of spinning up those big drives every once in a while?

[Nate Haustein]

I should, and I plan to, but right now I'm in a bit of a transition so I'm not at 100% yet. Everything I have is on RAID5 attached storage, and a second copy of all the source footage is backed up on off-site single drives. I'm not THAT paranoid yet. Just trying to be careful.

[Mike Watson]

I bought two four-disk RAIDs. Stripe them both. Copy from one to the other each night. One is live, the other is backup. There is a marginal cost increase, but the peace of mind is worthwhile. I have had RAID5s that worked well for years, but I always fought corruption issues that would take it from working 100% to *poof* in one harrowing instant. This is back when I had it all backed up on tape. Now there is no tape, if I lost the RAID I might go out of business. Sort of makes the $500 to buy a 2nd RAID moot.

[Jeroen Wolf]

Originally Posted by Mike Watson

Sort of makes the $500 to buy a 2nd RAID moot.

I'd be interested to hear what RAID you use for $500,-

[Mike Watson]

I am using one of these:

http://smile.amazon.com/Mediasonic-P.../dp/B003X26VV4

with four of these:

http://smile.amazon.com/WD-Red-NAS-H...dp/B008JJLW4M/

in it.

The OWC RAID is much more highly regarded; I have had nothing but trouble with both of the ones I had, I scrapped them both last year for the cheapies linked above and have had no trouble.

[Ryan Douthit]

- I store all my original footage on a Synology 1815+ RAID NAS
- Create a new library on a Thunderbolt LaCie RAID in FCPX for each new job.
- Copy all source materials into the library so they're duplicated and "complete" (since some jobs may pull from several master directories)
- Store final edits on DropBox
- Backup completed libraries to external drives for off-site storage

This seems to work pretty well for me.

[Nate Haustein]

Reviving this topic a bit:

I've got all my stuff on a few RAID5 enclosures in the office and have archives of old projects on hard drives sitting on a shelf at the office. Now I'm getting paranoid about natural disasters, fire, theft, hard drives falling off a desk, etc. I want to have an offsite solution. I'm sure many would consider this paranoia justified.

My plan is to buy a half-dozen cheap 4TB USB3.0 drives and carry the active one with me each day to the office, storing the full drives at my home. This isn't hard for projects that are completed and archived, but does anyone have a good solution for dynamically updating the drive with projects that are currently in limbo? I have a few clients with a consistent relationship and we are shooting for them several times a month. There must be a piece of Mac software that will track what has been backed up and what has not? So I can only replace what is necessary each day and not the whole darn thing (like 9TB)?

[William Hohauser]

Have you tried Carbon Copy Cloner?

[Nate Haustein]

I remember using it years ago but haven't seen that it stayed current with the times. Thanks for the recommendation. Do you know if it could use separate backup disks as parts of a larger backup? Wondering how I back up a 12TB RAID to individual 4TB hard drives. Know what I mean? Like a big JBOD kind of thing?

[Ed Fiebke]

At least for my needs, Carbon Copy Cloner has kept up with the time and has been a life-saver. It seems to be quite flexible in meeting different needs and situations. (It worked quite well for me for a failing systems drive. I replaced that drive and re-installed the OS and programs with CCC.) Certainly it's worthy of consideration for archive purposes.

[Steven Davis]

Ok, with a crowbar I'm getting this topic off the floor. Between the three machines I work on, I have 30 some drives. But now I find backing up to multiple drives and the having to manage all those drives to be like filing my IRS taxes. So I was thinking of DROPBOX for almost all my video file backups. I use Smugmug for my jpegs in my photography, but their system doesn't take raw photo files, which can be up to 100 gig for some of my weddings.

Anyone burning up the DROPBOX highway? I like to have three backups, and DROPBOX would be my offsite one.

This weekend I had another Western digital drive give out of gas, but I had a back up, so I'm trying to find the best work floor with a lot of files.

[William Hohauser]

DropBox is slow for large files. I receive large files on it all the time. Generally I avoid sending anything over 2Gbs on it. Slow and frustrating for time sensitive delivery of large projects. A flash drive and FedEx can be faster. What would you consider backing up on it?

[Steven Davis]

Almost everything William. For example, I use smugmug for my photo backup, but regarding non-photo types, it doesn't work. When I was just doing video work, it was pretty easy, I have a three bay drive in my pc that I would use as 1,2,3 backup, but now I do both photo and video work, between three machines, so being able to backup 350 gigs of wedding files without having to convert etc would be great. I have a basic dropbox account, but was wondering if there's a better file dump out there for video/photo that has been proven.