archiving to Cache-A from Avid interplay/MC

[Gary Hazen]

We installed a Pro-Cache a few months back. I haven’t had a chance to archive a project yet – I’ve been back logged with other stuff. We’re on a Unity system. FWIW, my plan is to create a new workspace on Unity. Consolidate all the media for the project to this new workspace. Then push the entire workspace to the Pro-Cache. In addition to the media itself I’ll also push all the non Avid files (After Effects, Photoshop, Original Audio, Word docs, etc.) to the archive. Folders will be logically named to sort it all out during the restore process (media files, graphics, audio, scripts, etc.) before moving them to tape. Once everything is safely archived to tape I’ll clear all the media off the workspace and repeat the process for the next project to be archived.

That’s my plan anyway. I’m not sure if it’s right or wrong, just a plan at this point.

[Tom Goldberg]

Gary’s plan is exactly our easiest recommended workflow for Avid environments.

Many of our customers just normally create a workspace per project and don’t even have to consolidate – just archive the workspace when the project is complete (or at various points along the way as needed). The only caution we’d have is to either make sure your content will fit on one tape (~1425GB for LTO-5) or span tapes but make sure you have enough blank tapes for the full archive before starting.

If your Avid shared storage offers up a LAN share, you can mount that directly on the Cache-A and bypass your workstation. If it does not, you will have to go through a Unity client (Mac or PC) to get the content over your network to the Cache-A.

If you are having problems with any of this, Cache-A support will be happy to help.

Tom Goldberg
Cache-A Corporation
602 Park Point Drive
Golden, CO 80401
mailto:tom.goldberg@cache-a.com
https://cache-a.com

[Chris Hefner]

I am in a facility that uses Interplay and ISIS and are currently looking for better solutions to archive projects and the entirety of their media to a near line solution, LTO, and external hard drives.

Reading your post about consolidating to a dedicated workspace then pushing made me wonder. Are you going to consolidate each and every bin from within the editor (MC). We just had to do this on a project that Interplay said totaled 1.9 TB. It took 64 man hours, over a 5 day stretch, tying up a workstation, because the project needed to be put on to an external drive to go to another location.

We felt this was highly impractical and are looking for a solution that can isolate all the media for a project within interplay and move it to a new location without consolidating.

[Gary Hazen]

[Chris Hefner] “Are you going to consolidate each and every bin from within the editor (MC).”

Nope. I’ll consolidate the finished sequence not the individual bins. My particular need is for archiving not migrating.

[Chris Hefner] “a solution that can isolate all the media for a project within interplay and move it to a new location without consolidating.”

If I knew I would need to migrate the entire project when it was finished I would create a unqiue workspace before starting post. All of the digitized/imported media would be stored on the same workspace. With all the media contained within a single workspace there wouldn’t be a need to consolidate. Moving the project to another system would require making a copy of the entire workspace to an external drive or LTO. I would expect that this would be time consuming – moving around huge chunks of data takes a ton of time.