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Simple Archiving to Blu-Ray?
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[Greg Ondera] “Are any of you concerned about getting a scratch on your archived Blue-Ray footage? I’m a little nervous about that. “
Always Greg, but believe me a BR disk drops from two meters high, and you can be unlucky and the disk get damaged.
But if a HD falls from one meter you must be very very lucky for your HD to work again.
Another thing is that if you lose a BR you may lose 50GBs stuff. With the HD..
rafael
PS: BTW I make two copies of the what I consider really valuable. Prices keep dropping. -
From what I have read, a BluRay disk was shown at a demo to still play after having been scuffed with a belt sander. There’s nothing wrong with archiving to hard drives, but what appeals to me about BD is that you can easily print and ship multiple BD disks pretty cheaply, just like DVD’s, off a Bravo primera or similar duplicator, at a low per-unit cost, and with less hassle than cloning and shipping multiple hard drives. BD disks can play in game systems, computers as well as set-top devices, so there are multiple ways to play it.
BD is not perfect for everything, but I am really interested in it for shipping out spots and VNR’s in high def to multiple clients who for some reason don’t want to use FTP, and I like the self-standing archive ability of the BD disks.
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We backup to bare 500GB-1TB SATA drives. I have about 25 of these. Recently I lost a 500GB drive #3. It had projecst from 2007-2008….about 30 of them. The drive just clicked. It was still in warranty too.
I sent it to Seagate i365 for recovery. After 3 weeks of major head replacement etc, they are only able to recover about 100 GB of the 500 on the drive. Naturally smaller files have a better chance of recovery. They are one of the best in the business but hard drives are fickle machines when they go bad.
After we lost the drive I got duplicate drives for all the backups we had and copied them all to their own backup. I have one set in storage and one at the office. Right now that is about $3000 worth of drives.
Now I know that if I lose a 1TB drive I’m not getting much back. I think we are all going to have this issue as our backups get nearer and nearer to the 5 year warranty mark. I will get a new drive for the one that went bad but will probably lose a pile of project data.
I am considering a BluRay option to save all files except the huge media files and DVD builds etc as a more reliable longer term storage. We used to backup project files on DVD as well as Hard drive with all media. Stopped doing the DVD thing about 3 years ago. Too bad. They are rock solid. Now it might be BluRay…(so slow).
Right now, after our recent drive debacle, I am less and less trusting of the mechanical hard drive. And Since 1992 I have only experienced a bad drive two other times, from Avids to Media 100 to IMix Cube, including system drives. This one hurt.
Oh, and the 100 GB I might get back? Cost me $1400. In this case drives aren’t cheap!
Rich Rubasch
Tilt MediaRich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production and Post
Owner/President/Editor/Designer/Animator -
Sorry to hear about your troubles, Rich. Not on the same scale as your woes, but I recently had the backup drive on my home system go into the “clicks of death” and it stopped being able to boot. I employed a modern-day folk remedy I’d heard of, and ridiculous as it may sound, it worked for me: I put the failed drive in my kitchen freezer overnight, and it booted up on the second try the next day, and ran for another 20 hours as I transferred everything off of it to a new replacement drive. You really have to cold-soak the thing for this trick to work, an hour or two in the freezer is not enough, is what I found out by trying that, but 8 hours or more DID work.
Back onto topic; I just think that you can’t get more “solid state” than optical media, unless we’re talking flash drives, which BTW are not rated to last forever either, and cloning/dubbing BD disks has got to be easier than buying drives. I know collecting hard drives works fine for a lot of people. I just personally don’t want to go down that road.
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This is probably the most important thread in Cow forums.
We are talking here about really, REALLY serious thing. We, audio/visual folk are just a tiny piece in this HUGE problem that is waiting to be solved by big companies like Sony, Toshiba, Hitachi, etc.
What we are talking here is no less than how HISTORY will be written. People have been writing all their important knowledge on stone, leather, papyrus, paper and later on film. Now it is ALL in hard drives and magnetic tape. What will be left of this after not centuries later, but only few decades? NASA has admitted that they have already lost ALL data from moon flights!!
NASA!!!
Future generations will have huge difficulties to find out what was life like in our days if something really revolutionary data storage technology will not be invented in near future.
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If LTO is a choice, BRU has their excellent software and LTO drives as bundles here…
https://www.tolisgroup.com/products/bundles.html
and
https://www.productionbackup.com/info/bundles.htmlLTOs are remarkable sturdy, need no power, don’t crash and cost under $40 for 800 GB backup. A Bru bundle costs about $ 4500.
If that’s too expensive, and your data set is smaller, like Red media, XDCamEx SxS, P2, or HDSLR video, then Blu-ray is a viable choice. You can do a 1 card to 1 disk backup for easy organization.
When larger optical disks are available, and there are indications that even 1 Tb disks may be available in some years, you can easily migrate your Blu-ray disks to these new large disks. Just like how you can read an old set of CD-Rs backed up even ten or more years ago. And migrate them to DVD-Rs or Blu-rays now.
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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India -
Promax is coming out with a drive array that has an LTO drive as part of it’s config… price is low as well. Don’t know much about it, but it sure beats the idea of drives or opticals… Opticals get scratched and drives simply die for no apparent reason…
Getting into LTO is expensive, but once you do it’s a ton less than opticals or hard drives. It’s also far more reliable. Banks use them for backup of account data in fact.. ever heard of anyone’s account information lost? Me neither.
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things.
8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO2 with MAX Cinema Displays
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Well, I never had anything BUT trouble with LTO systems and would never use that old technology again.
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Exactly, Petteri. We are backing up lots and lots of footage and project files to very sensitive and sometimes fickle devices and think all is well. Drives last 5 years and that is it. Sure some last longer, but it becomes a gamble. BluRay is very slow and has limited storage capacity for what most of us need.
These small cheap USB drives like the Western Digital Passport are being bought by camera guys who back up their P2 and XDCAM folders to them and they put them on a shelf. Some guys even think that just because they are so small that it is solid state media inside there and not a small 2.5″ drive. Three years from now that footage might not be relevant, but if it is and that drive doesn’t boot up, it’s gone!
If you had a DVCPRoHD tape of that footage and a deck, I’ll bet you’d be just fine.
I think at the next NAB the question that will be asked the most is “Where the hell are you putting all your media?”
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production and Post
Owner/President/Editor/Designer/Animator -
The problem usually is that the LTO wasn’t specifically made to retain metadata… these are for example: https://www.quantum.com/solutions/mediaandentertainment/Index.aspx
The one coming from ProMax I know little about, but it’s likely compatible with media files. Not all of them are…
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things.
8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO2 with MAX Cinema Displays
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