Remember your media doesn't exist till you have it on two seperate drives
 

OK New Boots. Remember your media doesn't exist till its on two different drives!

I'm still running the older tape based JVC HD110 with an onboard FE- DTE drive so I always have a backup. I don't recycle tapes either. I'm paranoid... So when I had a power outage the other night while editing I fragged some of my footage from an event... tried to cut around it, but it was all ruined and failures every 5 minutes with data system crashes. Still not 100% sure it was the power outage or my firewire cable durring original capture that shows stress marks (white stretching in the plastic houseing) so luckily I had my tapes labeled and then just recaptured and I had a happy ending... But if I recycled the tapes or if I had a HM700/100 and didn't have a 2nd drive that always has the backup of the footage.. I might have been really fouled up. So don't be a cheap skate.. at least get a 2nd firewire/sATA/USB2 drive and have your footage backed up offline for power spikes/brownouts or just hard drive failures. With tapless systems like the HM700/100 series it's tempting to not have a backup. Don't even go there. go out and get a 2nd drive if you don't have one and copy your footage over, then unplug your drive. You will sleep easier at night.

Oh, my story ends well.. and new cable on the way... still not sure it was the problem, but my old cable looks old anyway...

I have just started to shoot on cards after many years of tape acquisition with both raw camera and edited masters all still with me; many £££'s worth of stock but I've always been a 'just in case' person. I must admit that the biggest concern that I had (and to some extent still have) about the using HM700 is the sense of vulnerability that I have about these tiny SD cards. I nearly had heart failure when I started to get glitches in some of the clips. I now immediately (or at least as quickly as possible) transfer to a portable drive then onto my PC to edit and then keep a copy of the project together with trimmed clips. I don't know if I'll ever feel completely at ease. I have got the SxS back for the 700 but as of yet I haven't forked out for the £600 card to go into it which will at least then give me concurrent backup. And I though DVCAM was an expensive media to work in.

When I started 12 years ago, we were paying $30 for a 30 minute BetaSP tape ($1 per minute), $25 for a Sony DVM60 DV tape that recorded 40 minutes of DVCam ($0.62 per minute), $75 for a 3 hour DVCam large cassette ($0.42 per minute)...

Still cheap compared to film though...

At least SxS/SD and tape ARE reusable (tape less so...) unlike film... so we can find SOME solace in that.

Topsy turvy
 

I suspect there is an inverse version Moore's Law at work in storage reliability - every 2 years or so the current latest method of storage lasts half as long. (You can offset this by having twice as many backups of course). Am I just a cynic?