I have three 1TB hard drives (none mirroring each other) and its time to get another one. It's looking like weddings will be my main business next year so I wanna prepare for it storage wise. I'm also keeping almost all the weddings I've shot this year because I want to be able to give people blu ray discs and probably won't be getting that up and running for another month or so. So for each wedding I have the H.264 files and the Pro Res files.

Some questions:

1) Whats your storage/hard drive set up?

2) Is there anything system that is good to invest quickly in now and be able to focus on building later?

3) Do you back up all of your video on another hard drive?

Thanks

When I get back from a shoot, I copy everything onto my internal editing drive, and keep the original cards around throughout the edit. Then I back it all up on an external drive. When the edit is done and everything's been mastered, I burn everything to Blu-ray (data) and delete the files from my internal editing drive, and I format the cards. So I have 2 copies of the files to keep indefinitely -- one on the external drive and one on Blu-ray.

Travis,
I've been researching this also. Whats your budget? I've been very happy with my Synology NAS. I also use it to stream content throughout my house. I currently have a 2 bay with 1.5 tb drives. You can find cheaper versions of NAS systems, and others will recommend external drives. I'm looking into the 5 bay with 2 tb drive (run around $75 currently). The setup will be around $1200. I might look into using hard drives to archive work, haven't figured that out yet. Will use raid 5 or Synologies proprietary raid, don't know yet. I think you can just add on drives as you continue to expand. I'm looking into seagate 24 hour security disks, or just get more of the wd black caviar disks that have been working great so far. The seagates might be louder from what I've read, but I like the idea that they've been designed to run around the clock for surveillance.

I only keep active projects in my live storage array.

Projects are archived to hard drive (500GB right now, but whatever is cheap), labeled, and shelved, as soon as I am done with them. Hard drive storage is cheap and fast to write and read.

Ditto what Josh says. I also keep a back-up completed DVD set of each job, including a "data disc", which is usually a dual layer DVD with all the 1080p completed files. I just stored these in a box in a temperature controlled room.

Just upgraded my solution this week, actually. Went from 4TB mirrored to 9TB RAID-5. With numerous active projects in the works at all times, I just can't afford to lose anything due to an all-to-common hard drive failure. I assume you're using a Mac with the ProRes? You could use disk utility to mirror a pair of 1TB hard drives.

What I did was software mirror a pair of G-Technology G-RAID 4TB drives for redundancy. The enclosures have two drives inside them using hardware RAID-0 striping for speed, then I use disk utility to mirror the two so everything is duplicated. Could be a valid option if you're looking for something cheap, fast and protected.

Moving to a 4-bay enclosure is a lot simpler, and a RAID-5 setup gives a bit more effective use of space, but the costs are also a little higher. For under $900 I got 9TB usable space I don't have to worry about and is relatively fast using Firewire800. Worth the investment considering today's digital workflow.

3 x 1Tb HDD for current work
1 x 1Tb HDD for rendering
2 x 1Tb HDD in Raid 0 for second copy of originals
1 x 1Tb HDD for fused copies of finished programmes and a full HD copy ready to author for BD
1 x 1Tb HDD for storage of useful materials sounds, animated backgrounds etc.

Last two drives are externals.

When the Raid disks are full, one is archived, the other used with a new HDD in the new Raid array.

Results: Short term, two copies of the original clips, one in Raid. Long term, original DVDs/BDs plus fused copies plus original clips.

I just implemented a new storage method for me. It was time for a saver way of storing and archiving materials.

After a shoot (or even during a shoot) I backup my memory cards on a rapid image tank. This way I have the card, plus a backup on a HDD. And in case of emergency (too few cards) I can re-use a card on the fly, even though that really is a last choice, since I then don't have redundancy anymore for that card.

I use a 2x 1TB in RAID1 (mirrored) setup. This is my active projects drive. If one fails, I'll replace it and the footage is still safe. There's another 1TB drive which is used for cache and rendering.

Useful sourcematerials (like Philip mentioned) are stored on an external 2x 500GB in RAID1.

Archiving is done on external HDD's, not RAID, but manually mirrored. One of each 'pair' is stored offsite.

I'm quite happy with it. Feels good to have backups for projects. One thing I did learn through this recent conversion to my new storage-workflow: start out with a good/safe solution, don't think of it as something you'll switch to later on - it's a massive heap of work to get everything re-sorted and the longer you wait, the more material there is to transfer between drives when you do opt for a save storage solution.

First, may I correct my previous message - it is of course a RAID 1 I have (mirrored, not a RAID 0.

More importantly, because I know knowledgeable readers will have realised I made a mistake, it's worth remembering that RAID 1 is not a defence against file corruption. If a virus or other beastie gets into the RAID array it doesn't mean you've got a clean copy to fall back on; in fact you have two copies of the corrupted files. All a RAID is a guard against is a HDD failure and my guess is that there are fewer of them these days than viruses etc.

When back home from a shoot I use ShotPut Pro to copy the footage to my 2tb projects drive (WD Caviar Black) and simultaneously to my Projects Backup Disk (2tb Samsung Green) on a esata dock. Once copied I store the Projects Backup safely and work from the WD drive. I thought about a external esata RAID box for a RAID 5 setup but I worry the box may fail more than individual drives (for some reason) and then you've lost the lot. With my system you can survive a failure with a drive or system board and still not lose a thing.

Corey, how do you keep the footage on cards through the edit? I shoot 3 weddings a weekend so would have to have cards everywhere to actually keep the footage on them through the edit.

After the wedding I immediately back up my cards to a 1tb usb drive. Once everything is on that drive I then copy the information over to a second 1tb usb drive. The drives are about $80 a piece and much cheaper than getting a raid setup.

For editing I capture all the footage to a 2tb firewire drive and edit from that.

Hope that helps!

Get a 5 drive 6TB RAID system. Hard drives fail all the time and if you don't have a backup it's only a matter of time before you lose a drive and everything on it. Otherwise, get a VTR and start backing up to tape.

Chris,

I shoot on NX5U's with the attached FMU 128GB flash drive. Holds 11 hours of highest quality HD video, more than enough space for 3 weddings.

As an old time IT guy I know that the only sensible long term archive format is tape but for many years disk capacity & performance vastly outstripped tapes & it was difficult to catch up. Nowadays however fast, high capacity LTO drives with relatively cheap tapes are available. LTO-4 tapes now cost as little as $10-20 per tape with a capacity of 800GB uncompressed data per tape. New LTO-4 drives can be found for under $1000 while used ones run as low as $500. LTO-3 drives with 400GB native uncompressed capacity per tape are even cheaper. I haven't yet made the jump to tape myself but am closely monitoring the eBay auctions looking for a bargain.

Corey, how do you keep the footage on cards through the edit? I shoot 3 weddings a weekend so would have to have cards everywhere to actually keep the footage on them through the edit.

Hey Chris. I have a lot of cards, so I usually have enough to shoot with. However, if it happens that I'm low on available cards, I'll back the footage up to another external drive and then format the cards. As long as I have 2 copies of the files, I can rest easy :)

And I only do 1 wedding per weekend (unless they occur on different days, like a Friday and Saturday wedding).

Throw in my setup for reference.

4-bay raid system set to Raid 5 for redundancy and striping. All bays loaded with Hitachi 2TB Sata III drives for a total of 6TB in Raid 5 mode. This is where all of my current projects are loaded and hooked up via eSata. This drive pushes about 200MB/s which translates to roughly 30 streams of DSLR video. Way more than I can ever use.

For archive, I use two 2TB drives and copy the archive material to both drives. One drive stays with me and the other goes to a different location for storage.

I recently added a blu-ray burner into the mix and have debated burning my SD cards from the wedding onto Blu-Ray discs. I think I will probably begin doing that, but still debating the cost increase it will bring.

I feel a raid 5 is the best way to go because you maintain the speed needed while allowing for fault tolerance. Don't forget to make sure your drives sit on a UPS unit in case of a power surge or failure.

This is the particular raid unit I use:

Newegg.com - Raidon 4 Bay eSATA, USB 2.0, FireWire External Hard Drive Enclosure With Built-in SATA RAID 5 GR5630-4S-WBS2 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816142003)

But, if I had to buy one today I would choose this one for the Sata 6gb/s ports, USB 3.0, and lower cost:

Newegg.com - Mediasonic HFR2-SU3S2FW ProRaid 4 Bay HDD Enclosure - USB 3.0 / eSATA / Firewire (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816322006)

Granted, I run on a PC, so if you are into the latest and greatest for Mac, then the Promise 6bay raid is a killer unit when combined with Thunderbolt. It comes with a hefty price tag, but I have heard it rivals the speed of SSDs.

We use a combo of what a lot of people have said. In the field we offload to a raid 1 drive and a regular drive with shotput pro. I keep the data on the cards as long as I can only reformatting right before using them. At the office we work on a internal raid 0 which is backed up nightly to a 6tb raid 5. After the project is finished we copy the deliverables to a raid 1 drive for the client, everything to an external drive for off site storage, leave it on the raid 5 and delete it from the internal raid 0. Once the raid 5 is filled we take out the drives and start a new raid while storing the old ones. I am seriously looking into tape instead of or in addition to the single external drive.

I recently added a blu-ray burner into the mix and have debated burning my SD cards from the wedding onto Blu-Ray discs. I think I will probably begin doing that, but still debating the cost increase it will bring.Don't bother. Aside from the expense there is the time involved plus the generally unreliable nature of optical media (proper WORM drives excluded). You could be looking at several hundred GBs per wedding & multiple Blu-ray discs.

When people buy hard drives, are you guys investing in enterprise level drives for any raid over raid 1? Should I listen to the warnings from western digital to not use caviar black (desktop drives) in a raid 5 configuration. Their RE4 drives cost twice as much.

Cost wise it looks like just mirroring your drives cost as much as using a raid 5 setup, just more hassle.

The original white paper that coined the acronym RAID referred to a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It was the disk manufacturers who redefined it as Redundant Array of Independent Disks. The idea was to use multiple cheap disks but with redundancy so that if one failed you didn't lose data. The same principles still hold. You will have less failures with server grade disks but your data is just as safe.

Cost wise RAID 1 mirroring is the most expensive as you duplicate your storage. RAID 5 is the cheapest as you typically have four disks plus a parity disk (conceptually at least although the actual layout of data on the physical disks may vary). So with RAID 1 you use eight disks but only five disks with RAID 5 for four disks worth of data.

Awesome Raid 5 deal today on Newegg. Just in case anyone is looking.

Newegg.com - Shell Shocker Deal. Exclusive Jaw Dropping Savings on PC Components and Electronics. (http://www.newegg.com/special/shellshocker.aspx?nm_mc=EMC-EXPRESS080611&cm_mmc=EMC-EXPRESS080611-_-EMC-080611-Index-_-bottomBanner-_-ShellShocker-EB3)

Awesome Raid 5 deal today on Newegg. Just in case anyone is looking.

Newegg.com - Shell Shocker Deal. Exclusive Jaw Dropping Savings on PC Components and Electronics. (http://www.newegg.com/special/shellshocker.aspx?nm_mc=EMC-EXPRESS080611&cm_mmc=EMC-EXPRESS080611-_-EMC-080611-Index-_-bottomBanner-_-ShellShocker-EB3)


Sold out. :(

Oh well, I'm away from my desktop for a couple of more months anyway, so I guess it wouldn't have done me much good.

Whoa that was quick.