Hard Drive
 

Just wondering what everyone does to back up their footage?
Are you storing on multiple hard drives? Drobo? DVDS?

Looking for some ideas...

I don't know what computer you are using, however I use eSATA hard drives in an eSATA external enclosure. By using eSATA instead of USB or Firewire, your external drives operate as fast as your internal drives.

If you want to just use bare drives, this is cheap and readily available:

Thermaltake BlacX Duet Dual Hard Drives Docking Station - eSATA, USB, All 2.5"/3.5" Products Model: ST0014U [ST0014U] : Performance-PCs.com, ... sleeve it and they will come

A little more elegant solution:

NEW Icy Dock MB664US-1SB External Enclosure - eBay (item 380190939008 end time Jan-22-10 07:53:17 PST)

Or if you have an empty bay available in your computer you could install a hot swappable drive system. Lots of choices here.

Ultimate solution - hot swappable RAID array. Pricey but redundant storage. Like wearing a belt AND suspenders!

Currently I'm using an eSATA docking station with bare drives that i put in an anti static bag and take over to my parents house and put in a fireproof safe when I'm done backing up. Everyone has their own way of doing and this is what I'm currently doing.

That's precisely what I do. Stacks and stacks of 1.5 TB drives. I format them as NTFS so that I can open them read/write on Windows, Linux, and OS X. I make sure that the eSATA port I'm using is connected to a chipset that supports hot swap, which makes things smoother (especially on operating systems like Windows that don't allow full control over write caching and unmounting).

I store on 2 FW800 drives and make a BluRay DVD of all files as as well.

They are stored in the studio and in my house (different locations).

I also have a searchable DB, complete with thumbnails, that keeps rack of where files are and BD numbers.

Current projects are on one of several Raid L5 systems.

Most of my clients have their own HD's some have 2 one we keep and one they keep with all their footage and project files DVD images etc.

And all broadcast projects are backed up on tape. WE keep a copy and clients get one or more.

So most files are in at least 4 places.

Bare SATA drives in a docking station are what I use although I prefer the docks that have the disk mounted horizontally as I feel they put less strain on the connectors of the disk.