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Home Editsuite Media management and backup
I’m about to start a pretty media intensive broadcast project from home, and I need to get a system in place to ensure I can keep working no matter what.
I am thinking of two 8TB drives inside the PC set up as mirrored raid. That obviously gives me redundancy if a drive fails.
I’d also like to have a separate copy of the media on an external 8TB drive – but I’m unsure of the best way to do this. Obviously I can copy everything across at the start, but how can I just move the new stuff at the end of each day, and remove anything I’ve deleted? Basically I want the external drive to be an exact copy of the internal one without having to manually add and remove media.
I have a laptop with Avid on as well as the PC so if the PC fails I can use the external drive to keep working on the laptop.
Any suggestions?
Is there any thing else I need to think about? Obviously I’ll put the attic on a separate drive, and probably do a complete project backup each evening.
Thanks!
(Running MC2020.5 on an 8core Ryzen 1700x with 32GB Ram, 1660 GTX graphics).
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7 Replies
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I would keep it simple and remember the reason for external backup. Organization is everything. Day one when you have started on your PC, copy all sources to your external along with the project folder. Day 2, when adding sources; camera cards, video files, graphics, music … then simply add those to your PC in a “Day 2” folder maybe named by date. At the end of Day 2, copy only that folder over that has all new source assets along with your project folder.
The point for backup is that it is there for catastrophic failure. No need to copy transcoded MXF media. If a failure happens and you need to get back to where you were without loss, all you need is source files and project file … yes, it will take time to transcode again if not linking, time to re-transcode titles, video and audio renders etc. I can’t imagine you would have too much additional sources to copy over each day, and organizing in folders would make the manual copy easy.
I might consider two 8TB externals in case one of those physical drives failed. ALSO, even if delete files from PC, I would never delete them from the copied external drives unless you have access to those files in their original location (camera cards, dropbox, whatever). Deleting has almost always come back to bite me!
Just my thoughts on simplicity.
Ricky
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Thanks for the reply Ricky.
I’ll be getting a lot of new archive, and probably new rushes throughout the project and re-transcoding everything into DNxHR could definitely take a few days if my raid array was lost – which would be a massive problem the day before delivery or a commissioner viewing.
I’m also worried about things like scratch voice over recorded directly into Avid – the only way to back that up would be to back up the Avid Mediafile folders.
I’m thinking maybe I could create new subfolders inside the Avid Mediafile folder each day, so all new media will go in there, making it easier to back up. Would this work? Can I just increment the folder numbers – assuming avid uses the highest number for new media?
Obviously I’ll back up all new source media coming in as you suggested, and copy those across to the external back up as well.
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I understand. I’m not sure how MC prioritizes numbered folders inside the MXF folder. One thing is to do a quick test by transcoding something, create a new folder and test again. If all else fails you could sort by date and move media files to a new folder before copying but it should resort to that.
Ricky
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You might can dictate where the media goes – not sure as I haven’t been in MC for years now. Edited only on MC for 22 years before company made me move to Premiere.
Ricky
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You can only specify which medua drive MC creates media on. Not what folder.
But the rule is Avid will store media in the 1 folder until that’s got 5000 files then it moves to the 2 folder etc.
If you re number the 1 folder at the end of each section a new 1 folder will be created so you can manage it that way.Re the mirrored internal Raid will these be spinning HDDs? If so will one drive be fast enough?
Pat Horridge
Broadcast & Post Consultant, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
Free online Tutorials at VET digital media academy online https://vimeo.com/channels/752951
pat@vet.co.uk -
This is really helpful thank you.
So I could rename the 1 folder at the end of each day to, for example, 30052020, and then copy that to the external drive.
I’ll probably be working with 1080p DNxHR low bandwidth, so less than 5MBps, so I think a mirrored 7200rpm HDD should be fine. I think the read speeds are twice as fast as a single HDD.
Would SSD media drives make a big difference to responsiveness? I have a 1tb ssd, maybe it’s worth using that somehow-maybe for waveform cache? Obviously the project will be on an ssd.
I could stretch to a couple of 1TB SSDs, but I’ll need to see how much footage they are going to be sending me.
Thanks again for your help!
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There are also plenty of back up programs out there that will do nightly backups of “new” media . Set it once and forget about it.
Glenn
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