What is the BEST WAY TO ARCHIVE OLD PROJECTS and related media?

[Ryan Patch]

LTO tapes are considered the industry standard. However, these are very expensive.

For a small business, I would just recommend sticking to hard drives. However, use bare drives that you mount in docks instead of buying new externals every time. Saves a bundle. You can even have a “live” RAID array or something that you edit off of, and then move projects to slower, cheaper, 5.4k RPM drives for archive.

R

[Robert Ober]

Hello Folks,

I have been researching this while contemplating getting into the LTO archive business. Hard drives need to be spun up every few months or they will fail. In any case they will fail at some point, perhaps when you need the files for reproducing something.

You can have a post house or other specialist transfer the files to LTO. IBM and others have white papers on archiving and other than film, tape is still the best choice. Many folks are going to be crying some years down the road if the are not already.

Take it EZ,
Robert

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I would also add that LTO isn’t that expensive. The drive itself is an investment ($2,000 for a moderately priced LTO5 drive) but the tapes themselves are slightly cheaper than a similar sized hard drive. After the initial investment, the other issue becomes time: these archives are slow to write and if you ever need to dive into them, they’re slow to read. The nice thing is they are designed for worry free archiving (anecdotal evidence points to a shelf life of 5-10 years.)

LTO has been around over a decade and is designed that current drives must read two generations backwards so there is some safety within the technology that is implemented.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services

[Robert Ober]

I’ll bet 5-10 years is VERY conservative based on what we have seen with audio tapes. Of course storage matters. Cool, dark, dry and all that.

🙂

[Tom Daigon]

So which specific systems do you guys recommend?

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
Mac Pro 3,1
8 core
10.7.3
Nvidia Quadro 4000
24 gigs ram
Maxx Digital / Areca 8tb. raid
Kona 3

[Robert Ober]

Hey,

Having used HP drives in my day job of IT consulting I am about to buy this when they call me back:

https://silverado.cc/shop/product.php?productid=1474&cat=0&page=1

You might be able to piece this together cheaper. I believe you are moving to a Windows machine so you might find a cheaper card and software for that.

Y’all be cool,
Robert

[Hunter Starnes]

Thomas,

Are you using the Project Manager in Premier to reduce the size of the project or do you just need to archive the rendered films? If only the rendered film, you might look into getting some cheap online space in addition to hard drives.

Using the project manager I can archive old projects using only about 50-80 gigs of drive space. This does add up over time but it does help a lot.

Best,
– Hunter

[Thomas Barnes]

Thanks all.

I’m going to look into LT04/5 as an option for all corporate clients and other gigs.

For Weddings I think it’s overkill though, final output of what I need wouldn’t exceed 10GB per Wedding really – What are the thoughts on the 100 year Blu Ray back-up method?

[Tom Daigon]

Thanks Robert.

Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com
Mac Pro 3,1
8 core
10.7.3
Nvidia Quadro 4000
24 gigs ram
Maxx Digital / Areca 8tb. raid
Kona 3

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I have more faith in Blu-Ray disc than other optical media for two reasons: They have an anti-scratch coating and their dyes are metal-based and not organic so they don’t suffer from as much disc/dye rot, or so I’ve been lead to believe. You may, as a good practice, want to refresh your discs every 2-3 years by doing a full verified copy, but it’s not a mountainous task.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire – Digital Production Services