Backup Solution

[Jeff Carpenter]

Keep your Final Cut projects, music, and graphics on the computer’s internal drive. Keep them all in one place and it will be easy to back just those things up every night.

The external drive should really just be used for video footage from tapes. Firewire and USB drives aren’t the most stable things in the world, and if it should ever crash you’ll be happy that the only stuff you lost is video footage that can be re-captured from the original tapes.

You can combine methods here and continue to back that external drive up, but you won’t have to do it as often. Just back it up once a week or once a month and if you ever have to use it you’ll pobably only have to re-capture a few files from the tapes instead of an entire drive’s worth.

[Dan Riley]

SuperDuper is great for this.
It works every night, automatically backing up everything from my
project that’s been added or changed. I use 750 gig 800 firewire drives.
You mentioned it took you 9 hours to copy 260 gigs. You must be using
400 firewire. You’ll see nice speed gains with 800 firewire, pretty much double
the speed for transfers.

I use the firewire drives not only as backup, but when 6 months from now
I want to load in my entire project back into my RAID, I don’t have to capture
everything all over again, just do a file transfer.

Dan

[13]

[SimonH] “At the moment, all my captured scratch, media files and FCP6 project files are on an an external USB2 HDD about 260GB in total. All information in one place, so i can open it and edit on whatever workstation is free.”

Don’t edit from a USB drive, and keep the project file on a different drive, that way if the media drive goes out, you can proceed using a backup or by recapturing.

USB can only send packets of info, it cannot sustain a constant transfer rate like firewire can. They are fine for backups but not to edit from.

[Mark Maness]

[Danrnw] “I use the firewire drives not only as backup, but when 6 months from now I want to load in my entire project back into my RAID, I don’t have to capture
everything all over again, just do a file transfer. “

As a word of warning… You might not be able to reload these projects. External drives will die if not used regularly. I had a LaCie drive that died after sitting on the shelf for six months.

Be careful. You might ought to consider backing up your most important files to DVD or DL-DVD. It sure is alot more stable.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey

[Dan Riley]

Wayne,

My personal experience with firewire drives goes back to 2000 and I’ve never had one
that didn’t spin up. That’s not to say it won’t happen to me, maybe it will. (I have never
purchased a LaCie drive either. They seem to come up regularly on this forum as trouble.)
But backing up a 350 gig project to DVDs? Not going to happen.
DLT tape, can’t take those drives home and connect to my macbook pro and
edit offline. Not a good solution either.

I spin up all my 10 firewire backup project drives every few months because of
comments I’ve read on the forum about spin up problems. Maybe this will help me
not get into that situation. I don’t know. But for now, the ease of operation with
firewire backup drives, on the shelf, ready to be used when a show needs to be
re-edited, it could not be easier. Just one guy’s experience.

Dan

[Mark Maness]

Always good to hear.

What brand do you purchase? Or do you build them yourself?

You could say that I lost faith with LaCie but others have failed, too. Mostly major brands that are failing. So far, I have to G-Tech drives that are working well but they are about a year old now and making me nervous.

I have a co-worker that use a Maxtor One Touch III drive that seems to work very well.

Any thoughts?

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey

[Simon Hustings]

I’ve been using a 1TB Lacie now for three years (as well as multiple USB2 drives) It’s been running 8hrs a day, 6 days a week and it only just started making funny noises. But from the way you guys are talking, it sounds like I’ve been pretty lucky with getting that much life out of it!

[Dan Riley]

I was buying transintl.com firewire drives for years. Then two years ago I
started buying from Macsales.com (OWC). I buy the ones that look like
the box the Mac Pro comes in. They have 400/800/USB2 connectors.
Buy 750gig versions now.

All these firewire boxes are pretty much the same, except for the drives inside.
And if one doesn’t spin up, maybe it’s the drive and maybe it’s the power supply
of the box. I’d take the drive out of the box and put it in another box
before I’d call it over with.

I’d say 90 percent of the drives inside my boxes are Hitachi (formally IBM).
But some of the newer ones are Seagate. Anyway, even if they don’t spin up,
there are firms that can get the data off them in an emergency.
It’s not like they crashed. The data would still be there.

I’ve still got some 60 gig and 120 gig drives from 2000 and 2001 I still use
but not every day. So I wonder why I am so lucky with drives and other are not?

Dan