Best way to store all this video / hard drive set up?

[Travis Wilber]

I have three 1TB hard drives (none mirroring each other) and its time to get another one. It's looking like weddings will be my main business next year so I wanna prepare for it storage wise. I'm also keeping almost all the weddings I've shot this year because I want to be able to give people blu ray discs and probably won't be getting that up and running for another month or so. So for each wedding I have the H.264 files and the Pro Res files.

Some questions:

1) Whats your storage/hard drive set up?

2) Is there anything system that is good to invest quickly in now and be able to focus on building later?

3) Do you back up all of your video on another hard drive?

Thanks

[Corey Graham]

When I get back from a shoot, I copy everything onto my internal editing drive, and keep the original cards around throughout the edit. Then I back it all up on an external drive. When the edit is done and everything's been mastered, I burn everything to Blu-ray (data) and delete the files from my internal editing drive, and I format the cards. So I have 2 copies of the files to keep indefinitely -- one on the external drive and one on Blu-ray.

[Greg Fiske]

Travis,
I've been researching this also. Whats your budget? I've been very happy with my Synology NAS. I also use it to stream content throughout my house. I currently have a 2 bay with 1.5 tb drives. You can find cheaper versions of NAS systems, and others will recommend external drives. I'm looking into the 5 bay with 2 tb drive (run around $75 currently). The setup will be around $1200. I might look into using hard drives to archive work, haven't figured that out yet. Will use raid 5 or Synologies proprietary raid, don't know yet. I think you can just add on drives as you continue to expand. I'm looking into seagate 24 hour security disks, or just get more of the wd black caviar disks that have been working great so far. The seagates might be louder from what I've read, but I like the idea that they've been designed to run around the clock for surveillance.

[Jordan Nash]

I only keep active projects in my live storage array.

Projects are archived to hard drive (500GB right now, but whatever is cheap), labeled, and shelved, as soon as I am done with them. Hard drive storage is cheap and fast to write and read.

[Michael Clark]

Ditto what Josh says. I also keep a back-up completed DVD set of each job, including a "data disc", which is usually a dual layer DVD with all the 1080p completed files. I just stored these in a box in a temperature controlled room.

[Nate Haustein]

Just upgraded my solution this week, actually. Went from 4TB mirrored to 9TB RAID-5. With numerous active projects in the works at all times, I just can't afford to lose anything due to an all-to-common hard drive failure. I assume you're using a Mac with the ProRes? You could use disk utility to mirror a pair of 1TB hard drives.

What I did was software mirror a pair of G-Technology G-RAID 4TB drives for redundancy. The enclosures have two drives inside them using hardware RAID-0 striping for speed, then I use disk utility to mirror the two so everything is duplicated. Could be a valid option if you're looking for something cheap, fast and protected.

Moving to a 4-bay enclosure is a lot simpler, and a RAID-5 setup gives a bit more effective use of space, but the costs are also a little higher. For under $900 I got 9TB usable space I don't have to worry about and is relatively fast using Firewire800. Worth the investment considering today's digital workflow.

[Philip Howells]

3 x 1Tb HDD for current work
1 x 1Tb HDD for rendering
2 x 1Tb HDD in Raid 0 for second copy of originals
1 x 1Tb HDD for fused copies of finished programmes and a full HD copy ready to author for BD
1 x 1Tb HDD for storage of useful materials sounds, animated backgrounds etc.

Last two drives are externals.

When the Raid disks are full, one is archived, the other used with a new HDD in the new Raid array.

Results: Short term, two copies of the original clips, one in Raid. Long term, original DVDs/BDs plus fused copies plus original clips.

[Ruben Kremer]

I just implemented a new storage method for me. It was time for a saver way of storing and archiving materials.

After a shoot (or even during a shoot) I backup my memory cards on a rapid image tank. This way I have the card, plus a backup on a HDD. And in case of emergency (too few cards) I can re-use a card on the fly, even though that really is a last choice, since I then don't have redundancy anymore for that card.

I use a 2x 1TB in RAID1 (mirrored) setup. This is my active projects drive. If one fails, I'll replace it and the footage is still safe. There's another 1TB drive which is used for cache and rendering.

Useful sourcematerials (like Philip mentioned) are stored on an external 2x 500GB in RAID1.

Archiving is done on external HDD's, not RAID, but manually mirrored. One of each 'pair' is stored offsite.

I'm quite happy with it. Feels good to have backups for projects. One thing I did learn through this recent conversion to my new storage-workflow: start out with a good/safe solution, don't think of it as something you'll switch to later on - it's a massive heap of work to get everything re-sorted and the longer you wait, the more material there is to transfer between drives when you do opt for a save storage solution.

[Philip Howells]

First, may I correct my previous message - it is of course a RAID 1 I have (mirrored, not a RAID 0.

More importantly, because I know knowledgeable readers will have realised I made a mistake, it's worth remembering that RAID 1 is not a defence against file corruption. If a virus or other beastie gets into the RAID array it doesn't mean you've got a clean copy to fall back on; in fact you have two copies of the corrupted files. All a RAID is a guard against is a HDD failure and my guess is that there are fewer of them these days than viruses etc.

[Dan Burnap]

When back home from a shoot I use ShotPut Pro to copy the footage to my 2tb projects drive (WD Caviar Black) and simultaneously to my Projects Backup Disk (2tb Samsung Green) on a esata dock. Once copied I store the Projects Backup safely and work from the WD drive. I thought about a external esata RAID box for a RAID 5 setup but I worry the box may fail more than individual drives (for some reason) and then you've lost the lot. With my system you can survive a failure with a drive or system board and still not lose a thing.

[Chris Bryan]

Corey, how do you keep the footage on cards through the edit? I shoot 3 weddings a weekend so would have to have cards everywhere to actually keep the footage on them through the edit.

After the wedding I immediately back up my cards to a 1tb usb drive. Once everything is on that drive I then copy the information over to a second 1tb usb drive. The drives are about $80 a piece and much cheaper than getting a raid setup.

For editing I capture all the footage to a 2tb firewire drive and edit from that.

Hope that helps!

[Michael Johnston]

Get a 5 drive 6TB RAID system. Hard drives fail all the time and if you don't have a backup it's only a matter of time before you lose a drive and everything on it. Otherwise, get a VTR and start backing up to tape.

[Michael Johnston]

Chris,

I shoot on NX5U's with the attached FMU 128GB flash drive. Holds 11 hours of highest quality HD video, more than enough space for 3 weddings.

[Nigel Barker]

As an old time IT guy I know that the only sensible long term archive format is tape but for many years disk capacity & performance vastly outstripped tapes & it was difficult to catch up. Nowadays however fast, high capacity LTO drives with relatively cheap tapes are available. LTO-4 tapes now cost as little as $10-20 per tape with a capacity of 800GB uncompressed data per tape. New LTO-4 drives can be found for under $1000 while used ones run as low as $500. LTO-3 drives with 400GB native uncompressed capacity per tape are even cheaper. I haven't yet made the jump to tape myself but am closely monitoring the eBay auctions looking for a bargain.

[Corey Graham]

Originally Posted by Chris Bryan

Corey, how do you keep the footage on cards through the edit? I shoot 3 weddings a weekend so would have to have cards everywhere to actually keep the footage on them through the edit.

Hey Chris. I have a lot of cards, so I usually have enough to shoot with. However, if it happens that I'm low on available cards, I'll back the footage up to another external drive and then format the cards. As long as I have 2 copies of the files, I can rest easy :)

And I only do 1 wedding per weekend (unless they occur on different days, like a Friday and Saturday wedding).