What are your archiving plans?
 

I am so excited about this camera that I could pop! I will be getting mine at the beginning of the year hopefully and am looking forward to all of the footage that will be hitting the net. One question that comes up a lot, but gets lost fairly quickly, is archiving. I've though about buying lots of hard-drives, but those can fail and aren't convenient to hand over to clients. I don't believe that Sony currently has a deck that is affordable(for us small guys) and will back up your 35Mbps footage in 1920x1080. I've thought about LTO drives which could be a great option, but they are very expensive and would work great for personal use, but not for clients. I've been reading about write-once compact flash cards that could be very handy and easy to pass out to clients but I haven't gotten any pricing or capacity information yet. So, all of you early adopters, what are your plans for backing up all of your footage? I would like to hear both about your archiving solutions, and also about deliverable solutions for clients.

Burning a 8GB card to DL DVD would work.

60-80 Gb 2.5" usb2 drives are fairly cheap, $50-$70 - it seems like these could be good for handing off a day's footage to the client at the end of the day.

Even Achilles had a weak spot.

LOL! I hear what you are saying because it feels like a weak spot to me. Although I am thrilled to see tape go, it was a fairly good archive situation at a cheap price. Of course, now I want full-raster 1920x1080, and I want to record in in HQ 35Mbs because that is the "best", and I am not sure how to store it all.

Considering all of my projects would at least take a minimum of 10 DVDs of raw footage, I would need to rent space to archive all of the footage I would shoot in a year(and a filing system equivalent to a working library). USB drives are a good cost/GB solution, but they are still a rotating platter that if damaged or dropped you would loose your work.

I am leaning heavily towards LTO drives if I could find a decent used one. But these cameras are getting bought up by the truckload, so for all of the pros buying 8 of these, what is your archiving and deliverable workflow going to include?

I've just bought a Western Digital "My Book" 2 Terrabyte Ext. hard drive which I have mirrored so I have one Terrabyte available for AU$799.
(If one drive gives up the ghost, you can put in a new one and it can repair).

This seems to be a good solution for me as I have two copies and it's under AU$1.00 a gig.

As I do mainly events, once I have finished the projects I only keep a master disc and don't need the original footage again.

Cheers Vaughan

Thanks for your input Vaughn. If I were just working on one project at a time, I think this would be a great solution, and one that will work for many. But I have been toying with the idea of doing some stock footage work which would mean that I would have to be able to access all of my footage from a library which is why I am looking for a long term archiving solution.

Were looingk at using a server with a mirrored raid setup. SATA disc is cheap so you can get quite a big storage.

For safety were thinking of using Blue Ray Disc or XDCAM HD Disc that we put on a shelf in case the mirrored drive fails or if a file get corrupted.

A mirrored drive doesn't have to crash, files can be corrupted anyways and then the mirrored disc will have the same corrupted file so there is no way to save it.

We would like to save the "masters" in EX1 mp4 files because they are good enough and only 35Mbit so they don't get to big. And on a server/Nas we have easy access to all masters made if we need to do a DVD/Blue Ray or something else. I will also build a ffmpeg solution so when we upload a master it is automagicaly encoded into all formats we need like ipod, 3gp, youtube, DV25, DVD and so on.

Were thinking of getting the new Sony USB drive for our safety copys, but for the moment its read only and not EX1 compatible. This is said to be fixed by a firmware upgrade.

Raid 3, 4TB to work off and Firewire 800 Raid for backup.

Get a dual layer blu ray burner ($600 or so) and then you can put up to 50 gigs on a disc. The discs run around $25 or so I think.

Single layer discs (25 gig) run around $10.

This is a long term solution that will work without the expense of getting an LTO drive.

Hopefully Macs will have blu ray drives in them soon.

Daniel Weber

I would take two 500 GByte quality HDs (seagate, samsung), each approx. 85 EUR - there you can backup approx. 31 x 16 GByte cards (per disc, one disc master backup, one is copy). This is backup costs of aprox. 5,50 EUR per Card with 100% redundancy, exactly the cost of DV tapes.
500 GByte Discs currently give the best bang for the bug.

In some months, when blueRay is as cheap as DVD-R now simply burn the footage to get additional security.

Not that hard drives are a good solution for archiving, but the other day I picked up a 500GB USB drive at Walmart for $85. Unreal!

why are hard drives not good for archiving?

The obvious ------------------ They Crash!
Like many, I've had it happen and lost it ALL !
They are good if you can mirror drives. In the event one fails you have a backup.
But as someone mentioned before, if the data somehow gets corrupted on one drive, it
will also be corrupted on the mirror drive.

A outboard bluray reader/writter sounds to be a nice ticket....

that way it can be moved from more than one computer if need be...