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Edit Drives are Partitioned – How to make New Back up/Copy to Edit from ?
New Avid AE. No editor to work with now. This is a relaunch of a film with media in place and a film in massive rough cut stage. Loading some new material.
Was given two External hard drives. Both drives were partitioned and have Avid media on all. Drives are FW800 and USB3. Need a back up of everything because company currently has only these drives, and tapes and no back up to my knowledge of music and those sort of file elements. Would like to edit from a more robust drive like a GTech with more ports. Current drives are Sea Gate and Free Agent.
I’m not super technical when it comes to hard drives and Avid media. So any advice and specific directions would be appreciated.
– How do I make an exact copy of the media and drives? And should I make partitions on the drive or drives that the company gets for me? If, yes make partitions, what is the proper way to do this? Would one drive with four partitions work? This is an old project, so I think their reasoning was that if a partition went down it wouldn’t be as big a deal because there are tapes, but that seems old school, and like a time/money eater if that occurs.
– How do I properly copy Avid Media Files to new single drive if partitions are not necessary? Just change the Avid Media Folder numbers? And Drag media over?
Not really sure how best to proceed. Please advise. Thank you.
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7 Replies
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If going to a raided drive, just put all the original folders into the same Avid MediaFiles folder but renumber them as you suggested. Perhaps leave 1 empty for new Avid media (renders and such) or renumber starting with 2, 3, 4, etc. or even 10, 11, 12…
Once the copy is done, trash the two msm files in each folder to force the indexing on startup and everything should just relink.
Michael
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Would it matter if the drive is raided or not? Could I just go straight on to one drive without raid being ‘activated?’
Sorry I’m not to keen on understand RAID drives. Don’t some such as GTech come out of the box not raided? Meaning 4TB is 4TB even though it could be set up as 2TB on 4TB drive ?
Don’t worry about the partitions on the old drives?
Thanks.
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I assumed RAID in case you wanted some form of protection for lost drives on the new set of drives. If the new drive is just one large partition, then make the numbered folders if that’s how you want to manage the media. The partitions on the old drives may have also been created to provide some media management as you can render to specific drive, etc. within Media Composer, but not to a specific numbered folder within the Avid MediaFiles folder.
Michael
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Thanks for the tip regarding partitions and renders. That’s a good point.
RAID might solve the “having three copies” of your media rule some follow. Though there are the tapes.
Thanks.
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So do you think it would be better to have a RAID 1 because the drives are mirrored while RAID 0 would only span the media?
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How many physical drives are in the new set of drives you are buying? The amount of spindles can be used to increase speed or as redundancy in case one of them goes out – If you are editing proxy media for offline and your sequences are not complex for real time layers and VFX, then RAID’ing for speed may not be as important as RAID’ing for redundancy should a drive fail.
Michael
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No idea how many drives. The project is currently on two drives each partitioned so there are four partitions. All together the drives are supposed to be 3TB – but when I get info all together around 2TB is showing. Calculated drive space used, which is 1,610GB (390GB free right now).
A previous technical editor of the project left this message with the producer:
“Clone the media (don’t drag and drop, copy paste media files for the love of…) Clone with checksum. Carbon Copy Cloner. Then once they’re on the drive, throw them into new media directories. (you know less than 5k files per folder is decent depending on the speed of the drive). Rebuild databases from scratch. Re-index all directories. Then I’d go into the media tool and sort out the renders from media and get rid of most.
Move the renders to a temp holding directory, make sure nothing goes offline… then delete. Then set up a seperate partition for renders or seperate drive. Have a media drive, render drive, project drive. (or by that I mean seperate partition for each) If you’re going to use that drive for online work, maybe a online partition, and another partition for elements.
It needs a lot of media management. Most important thing is to just gather all the files by cloning them to a new drive, then put back the old drives in the box. Took me 2-3 days last year of letting it copy at night. (over FW800)”
Honestly some of this seems a bit daunting to me having never had to do this before.
Any direction or video tutorials would be appreciated.
Thanks.
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