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archiving P2 cards
I’ve been shooting with my HVX200 for a year and have backed up all media to pairs of OWC 500 GB drives, but I’ve continued to worry about how to archive long-term. Quantum has a drive for such purposes but it costs about $6k, too much for me. I’ve tried to research LTO as an alternative, since it seems well established in the IT departments of the corporate world, but I haven’t been able to find much information, especially for Macs.
So my current answer is to use dual layer DVD. At 8.5 GB each one will hold the contents of our 8 GB cards. When we move up to 16 or 32 GB cards, the drive and Roxio’s Toast will allow recording across multiple DVDs. At around $2/disk it’s cheaper than archiving to a drive, and may even be more stable… though none of us will know until it’s too late.
Barry Green was kind enough to point out the importance of write-protecting cards before moving them into a Mac, and I’ve continued that protection by locking the files once they’re on my drives. If you don’t, you’ll find that copying on the Finder level will regularly yield errors.
So far I’ve shot about 500 cards in the last year and lost only two: once in erasing before transferring and the other, who knows. I love the quality of the footage, but file management has been much more work than I ever anticipated. If you have any experience with any of the P2 workflow on a Mac–especially archiving– and can recommend strategies I’d welcome them.
Thanks,
GPW
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19 Replies
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Maybe it’s just me, but I’d never consider a DVD backup. For anything really, but certainly not something as valuable as footage.
I have a couple of reasons for saying that:
–The burn process can be flaky. Are you willing to verify every file after you burn?
–Recordable optical media is notoriously unstable. I’ve had disks fall apart after a couple of plays. I’ve only got a handful of self-burned disks that are still error-free after a couple of years.
–I know you didn’t mention blu-ray Gerret, but has anybody here burned some? I haven’t but it seems like they’d take a year to finish.
–Anyway, compare the unpredictability of optical media to hard drives. I just found a couple of Firewire/USB drives that I’d completely forgotten about. Took ’em along around the world while I used ’em, then in a box with no special protection for moves to 5 different houses in two states — and they came through like champs. Two years later, I’m still using them.
These are cheap, off the shelf consumer drives from 10 years ago. Newer, reliable, pro drives seem like the way to go for me…even if they’re not deep archive drives.
Not that any of this is specific to P2, just general storage thoughts…..
tim(at)creativecow(dot)net
My Cow Blog
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I went with an Exabyte VXA2 Packet Tape Drive for P2 and FCP project backups, as I like the fact that it verifies as it writes, and of course magnetic tape is still the best solution for long-term storage.
I initially copy from the camera to an external firewire drive (with verify), then I use P2CMS to copy (with verify) to internal HD. From there I back up to my tape archive and I’m set.
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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte -
Thanks Tim and N. Adam,
I’ve heard some criticism of DVDs for archive, but they’re probably the best compromise for now. While working on our projects–often for many months–I keep two hard drives of the MXF files. The DVDs are a 3rd, and are then given to the client with the warning to back them up. And yes, I do verify all burns.
I’d love to burn to Blue Ray, but I haven’t found one yet. Currently it takes me an hour per DVD on my LaCie to burn/verify an 8 GB group of files.
The Exabyte looked good, but their site says it’s for Windows only, and we’ll all Mac.
Any further thoughts are much appreciated.
GPW
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Since I wrote earlier I’ve found a firewire Blu Ray drive at OWC, and–according to the review they they link to–burning a 25 GB disk takes 45 minutes. Compared to my 1 hr per burn/verify 8 GB that’s hard to imagine.
The real question is whether you, Tim, are right about DVDs being too unstable to serve as an archive of footage. Anyone out there know?
GPW
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[Gerret] “burning a 25 GB disk takes 45 minutes. Compared to my 1 hr per burn/verify 8 GB that’s hard to imagine.”
Well there you go. I just assumed that it would take the same amount of time per gig.[Gerret]
“The real question is whether you, Tim, are right”
Never much question about that. 🙂
Mine was strictly an anecdotal observation, nothing scientific.
I continue to use DVDs, even CDs, all the time as transportable storage. They’re still the best media for that job. They’re cheap, they hold a lot, and they’re disposable. I’m just not using them for anything I want to keep around for long.
tim(at)creativecow(dot)net
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I’ve been doing a little research into archive solutions with regard to P2 media.
After looking into LTO tapes, Hard drives, DVDs and Blu-ray there seems to be no clear winner. Here’s how it breaks down (all prices in NZ dollars):
LTO3:
– Most expensive setup cost (the cost of the drive itself) at around $2000. In terms of tapes, it works out to about $0.19 /GB
– Large storage space (200GB or 400GB compressed) on the one I looked at.
– Approx. 30+ year lifetime.
– Write speed is quite slow when compared to DVD. Read speed is quite slow (due to the fact it has to do it sequentially. IE it’s not random access).HDD:
– Relatively cheap, around $0.48 /GB with no setup costs.
– Storage space varies, but significantly larger than DVD or Blu-ray.
– Unreliable. 3-5 year lifetime.
– Harder to store.
– Very fast write speed, random access.DVD+R:
– Cheapest of all options at $0.18 /GB.
– Comparatively very small storage space.
– Fast write speed compared to Blu-ray and LTO.
– 10-30 year lifetime.
– Less reliable. Prone to damage.Blu-ray:
– Most expensive at $1.41 /GB. Setup cost of around $1200 for burner.
– 50GB at dual layer. A lot larger than DVD, but still small when compared to LTO or HDD.
– Slow write speed (around an hour per 25GB depending on burner).
– Apparently very robust. 100+ year lifetime.Take from that what you will. This information was taken from various places on the net, so is by no means definitive.
A few thoughts of my own: To me, Blu-ray seems like a very viable solution. The 100+ year lifetime may sound a bit ridiculous, but I’ve spoken to several people who have said that they are incredibly robust and that really the only way to destroy the information is to physically snap the disc.
Of course, a huge advantage to the Blu-ray solution for those of us in the video profession is that buying the bruner gives you the ability to master high def Blu-ray discs (with the right software, of course). Which is a huge plus, espcially if working with the HVX.
And prices are coming down on the burners fast. I compiled this information only a couple of months ago, but recently I’ve seen a burner for $800 that claims to write 25GB in 25 minutes!
My research into HDD storage has been widely varied. Ultimately I’ve concluded that it is complete luck as to when or whether you HDD will crash on you. I’ve obviously had a lot of bad luck – in the year we’ve been in business we’ve lost a total of six external drives. Completely randomly. Thus, I personally have vowed to never use them again as a storage system.
At the moment we’ve resorted to using DVDs to archive until we make a decision. It’s been working fine so far… Though it is a pain having to manually split the 16GB folders into 4GB segments…
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Devil…thank you VERY much for this research. This is valuable information.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
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[DevilDodo] “DVD+R:
– Cheapest of all options at $0.18 /GB.
– Comparatively very small storage space.
– Fast write speed compared to Blu-ray and LTO.
– 10-30 year lifetime.”Hmm.. last info I heard was about 6 months ago and that research was showing that the dyes used to form the “pits” in burned DVDs can begin to fade in as little as 5 years.
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Video Photographer / Avid Editor / Final Cut Neophyte -
Yeah, I’ve actually heard similar things with regards to CD-R’s failing after about 5 years.
As I said, this info is not at all definitive… And worse, is probably mostly speculative. Hell, DVDs have barely been around long enough to be able to live up to its claim of 10-30 years… And we’ll have to wait 100 years to find out if Blu-ray lives up to its claim!
I think it also depends on the type of DVD-R you get as well. I believe there are specialist archive-grade DVDs around. Though my pricing was based on a standard spindle of 50 DVD-Rs.
Also, one thing I forgot to mention was that I’ve been warned off Dual-layered DVDs… apparently they’re even more unreliable and more prone to data loss than DVDs. Also, I’ve just realised that I had “+R” in my original post… My pricing was actually based on “-R”… not sure if that makes any difference…?
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I have been using blu-ray for about 1 year now as one method of archiving p2 cards.
I bought a Panasonic SW5582 internal and Toast 8. The drive cost me about $1000, but now I have seen them for less than $500.
The burn time is 45 mins for a 25GB disc, and about 90 mins for a 50GB. These speeds are of course optimal, and not average.
A 50GB disc may take 2 hours to burn and another 2 hours to verify.
The 50GB discs are down to $30 per disc. Maybe less if you can buy in bulk.
You can use Toast to burn data across multiple discs, but the size of the discs must match. So if you want to burn 60GB of data, you will need to use 3 25GB discs or 2 50GB discs.
I also have a Quantum 600a dlt drive with the mxf support. I like this format for projects that are larger than 50GB. Each tape holds 300GB.
Hope that helps.
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Art AldrichLeader, NJ FCP UG
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