What do you guys use to backup or archive your Vegas projects
 

I am sorry if this questions does not belong in this forum and if it is wrong feel free to move it. I am in the process of starting my own production company and am planning out my workflow process and figuring out a budget to go with it. I was wondering what the standard way for you profesional Vegas users was to backup and archive your projects. My main question is should I look for a tape backup system and backup the entire project including orginal footage, or should I just backup the project and graphics without orginal footage and just reload off of tape if I need to ever re-visit a project (My company is going to focus on corporate video so I am expecting re-edits)?

I know this seems trivial but I am just trying to start the business with a good solid plan.

I use excalibur and/or ultimate s(www.vasst.com)to backup my projects. With one click of a button it will backup your current project and name it with the time and date in a directory of your choice. I then backup that directory every night to CD. I always capture my tapes according to the label on the tape. For example, Smith-RS-Cam1. That way, in case of hard drive failure, you can just recapture, name tape the same thing and use your backup veg file and your back in business.


Vegas could be easily written to make backups of the veg file. Final Cut has this built into it!, it auto saves your project.

Good Luck,

Jon

Is there a simple way to automatically back up the source media unique to each .veg?

Brian

Yes.
FILE>SAVE AS>SAVE SOURCE MEDIA WITH PROJECT will save media related to each veg.

If you've got nested media, Ultimate S2.0 will save each nested veg file with only it's relevant media. To my knowledge, nothing else does this.

If you want to save the source media, consider a LTO tape drive. AVI video is quite large.


Jon

Jon,

That is what I am wondering is it better to not backup source and get it from the tapes if you need it or back up the entire project. I need to figure out the answer to this for budget reasons. I am going to be working with DV and HDV and I just need to be sure that DV tapes will stand up over time, so if I load orginial footage to do a project it wil not have problems. down the road. Does that make sense? So most of you just backup the project and load again off tape if needed or backup the entire thing?


Justin

Given the speed vs cost, we've moved entirely away from tape archive. Much faster, and consequently cheaper, to have a bunch of 60-120GB drives on the shelf and archive to those. 120GB drives are sub $100 these days.

Thanks for the feedback. I just looked up some prices and you can get a 250g sata drive for $79 easily and that is the same price as a good tape. Even a slow hard drive is fater than a fast tape. Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it!

Cautionary Tale:

DV seems to put a tremendous strain on these low cost drives.

I'm currently recovering from a crashed external drive. My data is spread across 5 external USB drives (including a new replacement drive), all for one project, and the drives all run from 125 to 300GB. This is with very little duplication due to the size of the project.

When I began this project, the drives were significantly more expensive. My plan is to now use these drives for archival purposes only, adding a 750GB drive to the mix as the active drive.

Fortunately all my veggies are regularly backed up and the original tapes are well labelled and locked in a protective case.

I cannot image how this is dealt with using the P2 cards, but one nice thing about the HDV format is the tapes are ridiculously cheap (My project is SD).


BMW

Well I chose HDV for the reason you mention The JVC and Panasonic cameras cost about the same, however with the cost of PS2 cards and the cost I would need in IT infrastructure I think HDV is the better way for me to go at this point. I understand the differences in quality, but in my market it will not matter. The company that does 99% of the local comercials only uses an XL1, not the the XL1 is a bad camera, it is just this place just really mades bad quality productions. My goal is to start a company with very low overhead and just blow the competition away on price and quality. I think HDV is the best tool to do that because of the tapes!

FWIW, as all the various shootouts have shown, there are no appreciable differences in quality.

only back up Vegs, photo's, graphic's to hard drives/Cd/dvd ... use genie backup Pro software ...

if it was received on Tape = no back up ... go back to the tapes if drive goes down ...

film transferred to hard drive = back up on hard drives ...

And what would you suggest if working on a project using little bits and pieces of 20 or 30 tapes, for example? :)

I always try to include the cost of a drive when I give clients an estimate. That way you can archive the entire project, avi's and all, and go right back to editing at a moment's notice if need be. For clients who always want you to go back in and make round after round of miniscule tweaks after they've already said you're done, full archiving is about the only way to go (unless you have 6,000,000TB of space or just love recapturing tens of hours of video multiple times).

If there's no $ in the budget for a drive, I usually tell the client up front that they'll either have to pony up or else make up their minds at some not-too-distant point and just say that the project is irrevocably complete and no further edits are possible. They either deal with that or buy a drive. There's no way I'm paying $100 for storage on each project out of my pocket. That's the client's problem, not mine.

Yup, I'm with Jarrod on this one. I now include an external drive in each proposal.

All it takes is your customer to request a tiny change to the piece and then griping at the £500 bill I submit to convince him that it's worth it! In fact, my cutomers are generally IT companies so they typically source the drive themselves from a regular supplier and have it shipped to me.

Costs the customer a hundred quid and keeps my edit system lean.

The other tremendous advantage (to me anyway) is that I can take the drive into the field and capture, via a DV-Rack equipped laptop, straight to disk then return to base and just plug the drive into the edit suite. Saves me hassle and time (=money).

However, I have had disasters with WD 250Gb Combo drives. Two have failed. And I've been quoted £800 each to recover the data. Ain't gonna happen.

This is why I switched to Seagate drives two years ago. Better warranty and (IMO) reputation as well.