How are you guys archiving your EX-1 master edits.
 

With SD, I just made a firewire copy back onto DV tape. What's the solution now?
BluRay? Hard drives? Thanks.

BluRay for me. Working nicely. I bought a portable BluRay drive so I could take it in the field with me when necessary.

Hard drive for me. I save the Avid intermediates and non-destructive edit files. Each of my customers own their own hard drive storage media.

Each of my customers own their own hard drive storage media. Dump in field.

I'm just a guy who likes to make videos, not doing this for money or anything.. I keep it all on my computer. Will be buying a backup drive a little later as I have more than half filled this 650gb drive already..LOL It's all hooked to my TV so I just watch them from my computer, although I will be going Blu Ray probably by the end of 09.

I do weddings, and thinking about archiving, not so much archiving in the field. Maybe I'll check out the wedding threads, unless anyone else has other suggestions. I may do the bluray path.

Backing up masters to DL-DVD but I don't doubt Blu-ray is on my horizon.

I use a Windows Home Server, connected through Gigabit Ethernet. With the WHS I specify that the folder that contains these video files should be stored redundantly. The WHS makes sure that all of the files are then stored on at least 2 hard drives. If a drive fails, I haven't lost any files.

So, I put all my eggs in one basket, but I make sure it's a really reliable basket.

The WHS can be expanded to many terabytes. It also backs up all of your Windows PCs very nicely, and it makes shared files available to all of your PCs. I totally recommend it.

I have a Blu-ray burner also, and I can back up to BD-Rs, at about $7 each for 25 GB disc (when you buy a 25 pack). Note that Blu-ray includes a great feature - defect management. When you burn a BD disc the drive will read after writing, and it will relocate any bad sectors to a "spare area". So when you are done writing you will know that you have a good disc.

How would you break up a 2hr 30min program on DL-DVD? Break up my FCP timeline into 8gb segments, export a few QT movies, spread across a few discs?

Along with a hard drive backup I also record a HDV tape. I know people think I am nuts right now but I hope to never have to use it. It is still HD however even if it does get reduced to 25 mbits and 1440x1080. At the end of the day it is still HD and if I am in a major crunch I still have some form of a HD master to go back to if I really need to. Eventually I will use Blu-ray once the discs get cheap enough. If you shoot in the 25 mbit mode anyway then there is no reason not to backup to HDV tape. It can be much cheaper then blu-ray and you know for sure it will last for many years.

Writing out a full sized mp4 file and saving onto DVD-DL would be cheaper and higher quality. And you can avoid the pain of having to do real-time data transfers...

In fact, you can easily fit two hours of high quality mpt4 onto an 8gb SDHC card for $20. Or an hour of nearly BluRay spec footage. I'd take that option over tape any time. I don't EVER want to go back to tape. EVER.

-P

1) We capture all our footage onto a Ciprico 5-drive RAID striped as RAID 5. With this setup, if one of the drives was to go bad, we can replace it without loosing data. In fact the RAID will run with only 4 drives in it (no loss of data) but will temporarily be operating in RAID 0.

2) We use Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) to automatically backup all the data from our RAID to a Western Digital My Book drive. That way if something was go wrong with the Ciprico RAID, we'd have a backup.

3) When the Ciprico fills up and we need to move data off of it and "archive" it, we use Retrospect (now owned by Dantz) Backup to library it. This is a slick system that I'm surprised more people don't use. For example, if 5 years later you need to find a logo or something associated with a project, you can perform a Search for the file and Retrospect Backup will search through all the archives you've performed over the years and tell you which drive or disc you have saved it to. It's a HUGE time saver when you want to restore data from the archives.

I've always thought one of the video magazines should do an article on redundant backups AND archiving. They always seem to leave out the archiving part, and it's important.

I guess the other alternative for our step #3 is to just keep buying more hard drives. But in our case, they are expensive and we can't afford to keep adding $3500 RAIDs when ever they fill up. :)

Why would an mp4 file (I really don't know what that is) be better than an uncompressed QT file right out of the timeline? I have to save 2.5 hrs of footage. I don't know how big that is, but too big for DVD-DL. I'm sure we're talking 50 gigs, I think.

It's not. I was speaking directly to Mr. Smet which is why I quoted him.

My situation is like yours which is why I write to DL bluray.

Oh, and an mp4 file is mpeg4. aka Mpeg4 par t10, aka h.264, aka AVCHD.

Okay, you've piqued my curiosity: I've been keeping an eye out for dual-layer BD-R discs, where do you buy yours? And how much do they cost?

For me, BD-Rs are still too expensive for the amount of material I go through:

DVD5: USD$0.09 / GB
LTO3: USD$0.12 / GB
DVD9: USD$0.28 / GB (IMHO not suitable for long-term archival)
BD-R: USD$0.43 / GB

FWIW, I'm still archiving to Taiyo Yuden DVD5 discs using Toast's disc spanning. Also, few if any of my clients have a bluray drive yet.