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Small Shop Needing Advice on Storage and Backup
I co-own a small production shop. We’ve gotten by in the past with working off either our internal Hard Drives (re:3 tb extra internal drives) or using externals, with no true back up system. I know this is BADDDD!!!! We’ve recently lost an external drive and did not have a back up and are paying the price. Since I’m all about learning from mistakes, I wanted to find out how small shops maintained drives and backups.
I know about RAID but between my partner and I, we have over 6 TB of drives that would need to be RAIDed. That doesn’t seem practical, but maybe I’m wrong. Some of that storage could be cleaned up from clients that we haven’t worked with in years, but we’ve had clients come back and were able to save the day because we still had footage. But saving footage for that long is another topic…My idea is to have each client (or agency as we do tons of small agency work) incur a charge for 2 drives…whatever size they would be (Agency would be 2TB+, individual clients starting at 250gb depending on size), and use Carbon Copy or other comparable program to back up drives. My partner seems to be against the idea due to the amount of drives we would incur between the working drives and the backups, sorting and maintaing them… and I can see his point.
Unfortunately, neither of us are IT experts. Any help would be greatly appreciated. This seems to be a step one issue and we sort of jumped that step when starting the business. -
1 Reply
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We use a JBOD drive box with four drive sleds and four SATA cnnectors on the back. Four computers get a connection so they can read/write to backup drives. We buy bare drives and have them in cases. We copy project files and media to the drives. Projects range from 50gigs to 500 gigs. A 2 terabyte drive costs about $130 US. A 500 gig project would only cost about $33 bucks for the entire backup (I also do a backup of the 2 terabyte as a double backup) so it’s up to $66. If I bill 1/2 hour of editing time it more than makes up the cost of the drives I have.
I don’t line item backups…I just do them. Clients love the quick turn we have on revisions…load the drive, make the fix, send the file. Awesome.
I use DiscCatalogMaker on the Mac to catalog all the drives so everything is searchable.
Works great.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com
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