-
Best archive workflow once project is delivered – to zip or not?
I recently had a bad incident involving media which corrupted during the transfer between a master drive and archive drive. Although it appeared the complete contents of the project folder had transfered successfully (the sum of files and file sizes matched between both folders), I later discovered that over half the media had not in fact been successfully transfered – and only AFTER I had already wiped the master drive.
Research indicates the only way to properly verify a successful, uncorrupted data transfer would be to run a md5 checksum on every file within the folder. I’ve searched high and low for an app that would calculate the checksum of all files within a directory+subdirectories automatically, but that doesn’t seem to exist – you can only do one file at a time.
So my thought is this:
Once a project has been delivered and is ready for archive, I compress the entire project into a zip file. I can then transfer this zip file to the archive drive, and run a checksum on just the zip file to determine a successful and uncorrupted transfer.Does anybody see any problems with doing this? Are there concerns regarding archiving projects into a single .zip file? Does that introduce more risk for corruption (overall corruption of the zip file)?
Thanks.
-
2 Replies
-
You should be fine with the ZIP file, but it will be a different “sum” then the folder/files it was made from is all.
You might want to think about redundancies with your media, always on at least 2 drives, if you’re not already.
Chris
-
If you’ve looked at BRU products, you could use BRU’s “clone” mode whereby you use BRU to read the source folder (backup), write it to a pipe, and then use a second BRU instance to write the data to the new location (restore). Because BRU is automatically calculating CRC 32bit checksums for both the backup and restore side of the operation, you are sure that the data that was written to the destination was written 100% successfully.
For example:
cd /Volumes/MyWorkDrive
bru -cf - ./Premiere\ Pro\ Project\ Work | (cd /Volumes/MyArchiveDrive ; bru -xvvvf - )
Of course, MyArchiveDrive could be a sparseimage volume that you created in Disk Utility, providing you with a self contained, yet mountable and accessible volume for specific projects.Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up