Do you charge your returning customers for archiving their data for ever?

[Larry Chapman]

Great question, and one that I’ve asked myself many times over the years!

My standard contract says that I will keep the data for one year at no charge, then start charging. However….. I have never charged anyone. I do go through my archive now and then and “prune” files that come from clients I have high confidence are “done”.

Very curious to hear what others do.

[John Knapich]

I have not charged, but I do tell most clients that I will archive just the consolidated project files and Master files. I have had a couple of close call incidents where I could not find or get to an old master, but the responsibility in on the client to have it. You should be upfront with your client about who is responsible for elements.

[Jim Curtis]

I don’t charge, as I see storing their footage as a value added feature of hiring me, and an inducement to hire me again to use the same footage in new or revised projects. I do charge for the time it takes to restore media from my tape archives.

If they want me to copy their media to a drive and ship it to somebody else, I charge them dearly (at 4X my hourly editing rate, plus expenses, marked up), and then look at archiving as another service.

I archive on LTO, which took a hefty investment for the drive and software, and it takes time and expenses in tape to manage, and space to store (I even bought a fire-resistant safe for the tapes.). I have to recoup that some way, and if possible, profit from it.

[Todd Perchert]

Don’t charge. That’s one of the costs of being in this business. It needs to be built into your costs. Used to be you had to buy tape monthly and keep/store those masters. Now it’s data/hard drives. But, if someone comes in asking about something that was shot 10 years ago or more, and we’ve done nothing with the footage since then, I can’t say we’ll have it. Simply because of data loss over so many years – whether failed drives or data corruption on the drives. But if we’ve used it on more current projects, then I’ll usually have it with each associated project.

[Mark Suszko]

I’ve said it many times; if you haven’t heard from a presumed dead-and-gone client in a long time, you will… … about 24 to 48 hours after you’ve erased their old files and masters. Every. Darned. Time.

My experience with clients over the years has been that very few of them are careful and consistent about preserving their materials. They may keep a convenience copy locally for weeks, maybe a year; after that, if they haven’t used it recently, they forget about it, assuming someone else (me) has a backup. Then they forget there -was- a backup.

Other clients are not tech-savvy and even though they have a file of the product in their network, it’s just easier to ring us up and ask for another FTP. Lol, had one client that didn’t understand FTP vs streaming and had to have it explained to them they already had the work product in their downloads folder… having downloaded it something like a dozen times, fresh, in a week, instead of looking for it on their own C drive.

Some of that casual attitude is because many of the materials are ephemera that have a short shelf-life anyway. Not everything needs to be immortal. But other stuff they generate sometimes has historical value or internal institutional knowledge value, beyond the immediate utility it was created for. And there are comparatively few long-term thinkers and visionaries in the client sphere that appreciate what they potentially have in that regard. Some people are just very short-term thinkers… living in the moment, without thought about the past or the future, if they don’t expect to be a part of that future…

I’m a pack rat; I’ll keep every darned thing, just because I’ve been bitten enough times over the years (see paragraph 1) and you never know what might become valuable later. Storage is cheap and getting cheaper every day. Some tech breakthroughs in cloud storage, inspired by the storage needs of the Human Brain Project and the Square Kilometer Array Project, as well as initiatives at AWS, are eventually going to hit the market and become available generally, and that will drop the cost per gig even lower. Ridiculously lower. What I recommend is that you budget for the storage up-front, even if you don’t mention it to the client, and add it to your markup as one of the costs of doing business.

I think another poster up-thread was very smart to suggest your formal contract name a concrete limit to the time you will be responsible for the masters and elements, and what the cut-off date for that is. My own sense of things is to never actually delete the materials, but put language in the deal memo to make your stewardship of them optional and no longer contractually obligatory and enforceable after a certain deadline. That covers you against eventual storage failure and the costs of migrating the data, and puts the onus for preservation on the client.

Charging them for the storage when they return? That’s like fining them for being loyal. You saving their bacon by having the backups is part of the “Added Value” in your Value Proposition, the advantage they get for sticking with you for all their business. You could mark it down on their invoice as a “no-charge” bonus… which makes you look generous. They don’t know it’s “no charge” because it was already baked into the original deal.

You could look on the situation as a motivator to up-sell a client or encourage them to do some more business. “Hi, I was just going thru our accounts regarding the last time we worked together, and we noticed we still had footage from your XYZ project in short-term storage here. We were wondering if you were thinking about re-purposing any of that material in a new project; many folks are finding that to be a cost-effective strategy these days… but if you don’t have any plans for the footage, we can either dispose of it or retain it in our long-term archives for you to use again later…” (if they want to save it, you then have the rate card for archival retention handy – you DID do some calculations ahead of time to figure the cost and a mark-up for that, right? :-).

Lastly, the comment on charging extra if they want to take it all away to work with someone else, is just good business. They’ve told you they’re done with you and there’s no more money to be made after this, so it is your last chance, not to punish them, but to recoup any outstanding money you laid out as expenses in serving them, plus, the machine and personnel time they are taking away from your other clients as you offload.

Is charging quadruple rate over-doing it? Not for me to say, depends on a lot of factors, and if they are leaving on relatively good terms. My sense of things is that, the circles we work in are relatively small, and it’s a person-to-person business. Reputation is currency. Word gets around regarding how good of a sport you are, how classy you are in your deals, if your handshake means something. Staying classy with even a departing client can have benefits down the road you never considered, in terms of your reputation. And it’s not impossible that a client that dumped you could re-consider, at some point, because times and people change. The ones that made the decision to dump you move on, new people come in without that baggage, and maybe they re-assess… And if they ask around to an old hand, they will remember how you left things the last time they dealt with you. iI you stayed classy, it becomes a potential opening to re-capture the business. If you burned bridges, you’ll never get the next chance with that client again, and never know you became a coffee-break story somewhere where you can’t correct the narrative.

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

Thanks for elaborate replies on various strategies and ethics in retaining data. All these strategies sound relevant at different situations. Charging is the easiest thing to do. However, as Mark said, you cannot penalize your client for simply being loyal and coming back to you, is an ethics eye opener.

<font face=”inherit” style=”background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”>I have surprised a client having done their films for 10 years, made a silver jubilee anniversary audiovisual with all their past footage, that they never envisaged. Some actions don’t translate into money, but creates </font>tremendous<font face=”inherit” style=”background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit;”> goodwill.</font>

My take away from your replies, as Todd says – “That’s one of the costs of being in this business. It needs to be built into your costs.”

As Jim says – “I see storing their footage as a value added feature of hiring me, and an inducement to hire me again to use the same footage in new or revised projects”

Thanks for all your insights.

Santanu – https://www.santanu.biz

[Jim Curtis]

Mark, you made some excellent points. Thanks for adding your thoughts.

When I wrote that I charge 4x to send media to a competitor, it’s not as onerous as it may sound at first. I generally don’t charge clients for unaccompanied machine time. If I step away for a render or a long upload, I go off the clock. My rate for my labor & creativity, including my hardware and software, which is currently $150/hour. The time I have to devote to a restore is maybe 10 minutes to locate the tapes I need and start the restore to a RAID. I buy a drive from Amazon: 5 minutes. I start a copy process to that drive: two minutes. I box up the drive and make a UPS / FedEx label: 10 minutes. I also charge my clients for email correspondence / administration; so add another five minuets. So, the total of my time may be 30 minutes at $600/hour, or $300, plus shipping and cost of the drive. That’s not bridge burning level extortion.

If I did want to “punish” a client, I’d include all my machine time. But, then the bill would be more like $1200+, which still isn’t unreasonable given what cloud storage used to be.

[Chris Gomersall]

Yes. I do. But a minimal $50-$100 for a USB hard drive that I hang on to is added to original invoice. Once I explain the expense they are all onboard.

[Santanu Bhattacharjee]

Chis , thanks for your insight. However, would you charge your returning customer the same, if he asks for the entire data and plans to go elsewhere to re-edit / reuse that?

[Al Bergstein]

When the project seems “done” (a year or so) I usually send them a nice note saying that given that the project seems over and I don’t charge to archive projects (as it takes up hard disk space I pay for) that I am glad to hand them all their footage on a hard disk if they bring one to me. That way, if I die tomorrow, they don’t need to go to my heirs to get their footage.

Al