Backup Strategy Advice

[Emiliano Tidona]

Relax 🙂

[Michael Sanders]

I’ve been messing with this the past few days as I’ve just retired my old Drobo S as its too slow…

The first thing I do is make optical copies of the rushes. I have a LG blu ray burner for this reason. 50GB discs are about £6 ea now and I make sure I add a day to edit quotes to cover my time.

I personally keep camera rushes out of the event file. The trick here is to ingest via FCP X, then when its done, quit X, move the media out of the event to say “Projects-XX Project-Rushes”. Fire up FCP X and then relink to this destination. X will then create symbolic links (assuming you don’t tick move media) to the files in their new destination.

The beauty of doing this is: Like you I you chronosync or CCC to dupe my work drive. If you forget to move the projects and events with event manager at least it doesn’t need to recopy everything.

One thing I do when archiving a project to an archive drive is delete the render files – they can be huge. Once you do all this, event and project folders are much smaller and easier to backup to a NAS or similar.

It’s still my biggest biggest bug bear with X, the fact this (ie backup/archiving) is not simple.

Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor

[Jeff Kirkland]

I’ve oscillated between keeping media in the events folder and just linking to it over the time I’ve been using FCPX. There are definite advantages to just linking and if I do, then I use Magic Bullet Grinder, ClipWrap, or MPEG Streamclip to ingest/transcode. On the other hand, there’s a certain simplicity to just letting FCPX import everything to an event folder. It makes final archiving a breeze and I never have to wonder if I’m leaving any media behind.

When archiving I delete both render files and optimised media as both of those can be reconstructed from whatever is in the original media folder.

I’d probably do things differently if I trusted FCPX’s ability to re link files a little more.

Right now I’m toying with the idea of creating a project folder that has all the assets, documents, images, whatever and also contains a sparsebundle drive that, when mounted, would contain the FCPX event and project. The downside is that Chronosync would have to copy the entire sparsebundle every night which could be in the hundreds of gigs.

I may try it on my next project and see how much of a pain it really is. There’s certainly a lot of pluses when it comes to final archiving.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Michael Sanders]

[Jeff Kirkland] “I’ve oscillated between keeping media in the events folder and just linking to it over the time I’ve been using FCPX. There are definite advantages to just linking and if I do, then I use Magic Bullet Grinder, ClipWrap, or MPEG Streamclip to ingest/transcode. On the other hand, there’s a certain simplicity to just letting FCPX import everything to an event folder. It makes final archiving a breeze and I never have to wonder if I’m leaving any media behind. “

As I said it works very well if you ingest in X then quite and pull the media out to another directory. When you restart X it will relink the media.

I think this is the way I’m going from now on..

Michael Sanders
London Based DP/Editor

[Jeff Kirkland]

Michael, I’m giving your idea a try on the project I started today.

I had planned to have a folder for the media and a sparse image to keep the FCPX project and event in so it was all nice and tidy, but Chronosync can’t reliably backup an open sparse bundle and I figured there was too much risk of me forgetting to close it at the end of the day.

I’ll move the FCPX project into a sparse bundle to archive it when I’m done. That way all of the assets are in one logical place if I need to revisit it.

It’s taken a while but I think I might finally have found a system I’m happy with. Thanks for the suggestion.

Jeff Kirkland | Video Producer | Southern Creative Media | Melbourne Australia
http://www.southerncreative.com.au | G+: https://gplus.to/jeffkirkland | Twitter: @jeffkirkland

[Brett Sherman]

[Jeff Kirkland] “The downside is that Chronosync would have to copy the entire sparsebundle every night which could be in the hundreds of gigs.”

Chronosync can look into the sparse bundle and copy only the changes. In the options section look for “Special File/Folder Handling” and then select “Custom”. Then check the box that says “Dissect Packages” This speeds things up dramatically.

[Matt Larson]

I have been using the same media across a few projects lately and I stumbled on to a system that works pretty well in those cases. I keep my Events and Projects on Sparseimages but I have been splitting them up. So, I’ll import all my camera footage to one sparseimage with “_footage” or something in the name. I can mount the image, do all my keywording, etc and then when it’s time to start a project I create another disk image, with “_X” at the end (I’ll get back to this in a second). I’ll create an Event on that sparseimage with audio, VO, renders from AE, and other project specific items.

There are a few things I like about splitting them up:

I can use the same media in several projects without having to have all the projects open (or I can mount the images and have them open if I need to).
I have an Automator task setup to nightly back up all the sparseimage files that have “_X” in the name. This keeps my project backups manageable size-wise and I’m not cloning footage.
All of my imported camera media is in one diskimage when it comes time to back up.

2 x3Ghz Quad MacPro
9 GB RAM
Mac OS X 10.5.5
QT 7.5.5
FCP 6.0.5
AJA Kona 3 (6.0.1 drivers)
G-Speed XL 12 RAID