Chris ,
I have bought an eSATA swapable drive system, but have no good solution to how to physically store the drives themselves when they are not being used. They look fragile and have circuit board stuff exposed, etc. - how do you store them? Haven't seen anyone selling something for this.

Lenny Levy

Vhs Cases
 

They say VHS cases are an almost perfect fit for bare hard drives... I have yet to check on on that, but it sounds like a nice standard form factor for archival, there must be cheap furniture designed for itt.

I'd probably put the hard disk into its original anti static bag, to save it from ESD, and then throw a little piece of foam to cushion the VHS case, so the disk doesn't rattle inside. Maybe also some silica gel.

Does that even make sense? Excuse my English, it's not my first language and right now i'm lacking sleep :)

Daniel, that is a great idea with the VHS tape covers. I have heaps left over from years ago when I stopped offering VHS and moved onto DVD.

Also I like the idea of a BR-R, if your backing it up you will only need to archive it anyway, so that would be perfect for finished products and raw files. Plus a once write disc should burn much faster than a re-write?

I mostly buy segate drives and they are shipped in a plastic protection enclosure. Other drives comes in a ESD protection bag but they are of course less protected to a good beating.

Our plan is to use a server for storage but also have it on XDCAM HD discs when the USB Drive from Sony will write EX Formats (if it ever will).

I've seen nice padded leather cases for bare eSATA drives, so I know they're out there. Now if I could only remember where...

I shot a couple hours of footage on the EX1 this weekend and currently have all of that on both my laptop and an external bus-powered USB drive. For my purposes I'd say redundant hard drive backups are as good a solution as any, and have the advantage of being readily accessible for editing. If hard drives make you nervous then you'll have to think of something else, but I can't think of a more convenient or affordable option.

P.S. I finally get it about the whole solid-state workflow concept, now that I've seen a version of that which works smoothly enough to be useful. Being able to transfer 30 minutes of footage in under 4 minutes is great, and the EX1 footage plays fine in Windows with the camera software installed. Much better than a certain other solid-state video option as far as I'm concerned...

If only Sony would stop screwing-about and make whatever updates are required to the PDW-U1. It would be so great to burn the EX1's full-monty 1920x1080 video to a Sony professional disk and not have to worry about re-archiving again for 50 years. I get warm and tingly when I think about that. Lol.

For the moment I am using 2 USB hard drives. I simply copy the contents of the card to both drives.

When Sony release the F700 50Mb XDCAM HD camera next year (spring??) they are going to have to update the U1 to work with full raster 1920x1080 XDCAM MXF's so at that time I will switch to Professional Discs for my backups.

Alister, I am a little less depressed after reading what you had to say about the U1.

Regarding archival: Do you feel that your data is safe on just two usb drives? Do you back-up to dual-layer dvd or something? I am wary of HDs, although, I have only had one fail on me, and that was most likely due to technical ineptitude more than error on the drives behalf.

On a more random note, I was thinking about what it would be like trying to back-up, say....25 hours of full-resolution video from the ex1 onto single layer dvds. (I know it's illogical, but I'm thinking of a worse-case scenario here). Let's say for the sake of organization you use 4 dvds for every 50 mins (16 gbs) of footage. That wouldn't quite fill up the space of a blank dvd, but it would keep everything consistent and "reasonably" manageable. That would equal 120 dvds and many hours of boredom spent burning them. I personally always back-up to dvd twice...so that means 240 dvds. Haha! Despite such a ridiculous amount of disks, I want this camera so badly I would be willing to do that to archive. The good thing is that because I am shooting features and not doing any weddings etc. I won't have as much footage to save. It is unlikely that I will shoot over 25 hours of footage for a 90 minute feature, especially considering that one can just delete unwanted takes on the fly with this camera.

I agree the the U1 will be the best price/reliability option once it's upgraded to full-raster but for now, HD should be safe. Remember, hard drives *usually* only crash when they're spinning. Fill it up, put it on a shelf and pull it off once the U1 comes to town.

Also... rethink your archives. I currently shoot on miniDV and have over 1000 tapes in my cataloged library. I still need access to them but I need to change my thinking about archiving. Do I need to archive every minute I shoot? I do with tape. However, with tape-less workflow, I can delete the bad takes and only archive the good takes. If I shoot a 10:1 ratio then my storage needs will decrease by 90%.

This is a good way of thinking for commercial and training video producers like myself... not so good for documentary guys, they need to keep every minute.

The bad thing about video tape as archive is the lack of random access and the inability to see "clips."

Imagine have to go through hours of tape to find a shot. Looking at thumbnails on hard drive or optical disc is much faster.

While the tapes are good if you need to load back in an entire project, it's not good for hunting shots.

Also as time marches on and formats change, tape decks for a given format become scarce. Trying to find a D2 machine to play a tape from a project from 1992 is a research project in itself. On the other hand playing a CD from the same year is still easy.

It seems optical disc format playback has much greater longevity than tape decks.

Once your ancient Hi8 camera goes do you have a Hi8 tape deck to play back those tapes. Will you find one in 5 to 10 years?

HDV will be even worse given the number of incompatible variations not playable on other cameras or decks.

Give me an optical disc any day.

Anyone who relies on a hard drive for long term archiving is setting themselves up for DISASTER.

Hard drives are a MID-TERM archiving solution, NOT a long-term solution.

I will NOT trust my important client's footage on a drive whose spindle dries out from non use, thereby making the data unreadable.

SDLT, LTO3 and LTO-4 tapes are good for 30-40 YEARS, and is what is on my archiving shopping list.

What about dl dvds? Are they as reliable as sl dvds? I wouldn't use them for long-term archiving; just until the U1 can handle full 1920x1080.

You might want to consider that its moisture that causes the grease to thicken up and eventually stall the motor. Keeping a drive in a humidity and temperature controlled enclosure will increase its shelf life. I do agree that hard drives are not reliable for long term storage.

When a drive is operating, the heat generated keeps the moisture driven off and the grease in better shape.

Storing a drive unprotected in an area where temperature and humidity swings about is the worst thing you can do and it will shorten its life. Our homes are certainly bad places to store drives without protection. The best thing you can do is put them in a sealed case (like a Pelican case) with a desiccant bag in the case along with it. Be sure to save the antistatic bag the drive came in and put it in there with it open to allow the desiccant to do its job.

Here is what I'm talking about - http://www.sprucemtsurplus.com/051503/P5150013.jpg

They are cheap and reusable. Just bake them in the oven for a bit and they are recharged.

Regardless,

Drives are NOT long term storage solutions. If you rely on them to be so, you will get burned.

Its your money.