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Archiving EX-1 footage on LTO
Hi,
We’ve been shooting with the Ex-1 for about a year now and have been trying (and failing) to be scrupulous with our back ups. We’ve been backing up on hard drive and DVD DLs (which is painfully slow and tedious) .
Just wondering if anyone has experience using LTO? We have a HP Storageworks Ultrium 448 hooked up to our server for data backups. I’m wondering if we could use this for our footage rather than piling DVD DLs?
Thanks
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8 Replies
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We’ve been using the EX cameras for about 16 months and are amassing a huge amount of data. We have had no experience with Dl’s, but we just do a back up to two different hard drives, then rescan them once a year. 1TB drives are so inexpensive, like $130 at Costco that it seems to be the way to go. We keep one drive in the safe. Granted you need a pretty decent sized safe, but the system is safe, simple and fast.
jw
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Hi Jim,
My worry with solely relying on hard drives is the potential failure – whether its magnetic failure or just something more general.
Alan
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We keep an online archive RAID attached to an iMac, which is also used for project managers to go and browse footage. Archives right now are done to DVD, which are in our gigantic fire safe. I have a PDW-U1 waiting for the firmware to turn it into a high capacity data drive. I know there was some software out in the UK or something, but I don’t feel like a guinea pig right now.
Cf
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Yeah hard drives fail as long term storage- especially if you keep them offline for extended periods of time. LTO is the best way to guarantee you’ll actually be able to access footage later in life when you need it. If you’re on a Mac, try BRUProducer- it totally rocks with LTO:
https://www.productionbackup.com/
Noah
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Thanks Noah,
BRUProducer looks perfect. Unfortunately the LTO drive is attached to a HP server.
Anyone know if these can be shared out on the network or is that just crazy talk?
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Always remember hard drives will fail! If you keep this in mind, always have two copies on separate drives, then back up to LTO3. An LTO drive is so much cheaper than a re-shoot!
Also, try and make separate, redundant copies, bypassing any form of raid 1 setups. ifa raid controller fails, it may cost as much as a LTO drive to rebuild drive metadata.
I have learned from all conceivable worst-case scenarios. Beware.Colin
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For smaller scale archiving, will backing up to Blu-ray DVD work?
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[Ed Kukla] “For smaller scale archiving, will backing up to Blu-ray DVD work?”
Yes. There’s BD-R which is the same principle as DVD-R. Burn once and archive. Then there’s BD-RE which is re-writable like DVD-RW. I believe both types of Blu-ray discs come in the 2 capacities of 25 and 50 gigabytes.
– Don
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