Hard Drive Failure - It does happen

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Craig,

Atomos recorders are recording whatever the camera is putting out "live" over the HDMI cable, so if your camera continues the live HDMI video output Atomos will just keep recording whatever you send it.

I have older HDV cameras and can record straight to Ninja 2 for many hours without interruption even if I'm changing tapes every hour!

Thanks

[Craig McKenna]

Originally Posted by Jeff Pulera

Hi Craig,

Atomos recorders are recording whatever the camera is putting out "live" over the HDMI cable, so if your camera continues the live HDMI video output Atomos will just keep recording whatever you send it.

I have older HDV cameras and can record straight to Ninja 2 for many hours without interruption even if I'm changing tapes every hour!

Thanks

Thanks for this Jeff - I'll do some research, or get the GH4R.

[Steve Burkett]

Originally Posted by Craig McKenna

Thanks for this Jeff - I'll do some research, or get the GH4R.

I was in a similar situation; I went for the GH4r. Having worked with it for several months, I now plan to get another. An external recorder is still potentially on the cards, but I find the GH4r very reliable.

[Craig McKenna]

Originally Posted by Steve Burkett

I was in a similar situation; I went for the GH4r. Having worked with it for several months, I now plan to get another. An external recorder is still potentially on the cards, but I find the GH4r very reliable.

Thanks Steve, have you used 4K mode and ran it for an hour???

I am planning to get the GH4R for my next church wedding in June. Peace of mind. Seems to sold out across the country though.

[Steve Burkett]

Originally Posted by Craig McKenna

Thanks Steve, have you used 4K mode and ran it for an hour???

I am planning to get the GH4R for my next church wedding in June. Peace of mind. Seems to sold out across the country though.

Yep, I ran it for 2 hours though changed the battery for peace of mind. However I've ran it continuously for 1 hour 15 mins on a couple of occasions.

[Craig McKenna]

Originally Posted by Steve Burkett

Yep, I ran it for 2 hours though changed the battery for peace of mind. However I've ran it continuously for 1 hour 15 mins on a couple of occasions.

Thanks Steve! Will pick it up in a week or two when it's back in stock!

Thanks again!

[Ed Roo]

grc.com

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[Danny O'Neill]

If you go for RAID 5 you also need backups. RAID 5 will only protect you against a single drive failure, more if you have more redundant disks in the array. But you still need to be ready for entire array failure, fire, theft, corruption etc. I lost an entire Buffalo Terastation a few years back as a power blip caused the unit to loose its network config and its IP became 0.0.0.0 and there was no way to set this without it having a valid network address. Meant the entire array was lost. But I had backups.

Our current setup is a RAID 5 array for our master editing system (we use Synology Diskstation units) which backups us all current projects to a USB attached drive.

That has a real time replication of everything except the video source files to another NAS offsite. We don't use the internet for transferring the video files, just too slow so we do that manually with a hard drive. That also performs backups but once a week rather than daily.

So if we delete something by mistake, save a project by mistake we can go back to a point in time.

A full write up is on our blog

Storage and Backups for Small Businesses ?*Minty Slippers

There are very few scenarios we arent protected against and it does help me sleep better. Just imagine how sick you would feel when you get that hard drive fail and you loose a clients wedding. Thats when you check your insurance is valid :)

As for replacing drives I would say there is no need to have a replacement program. Chances are every 5 years you will maybe look to increase your capacity anyway to meet your growing business needs and its then you replace them.

We use WD Red drives. Designed for constant running in NAS units. They run cooler for longer life, handle vibration better and have great transfer speeds.

[Craig McKenna]

Originally Posted by Danny O'Neill

If you go for RAID 5 you also need backups. RAID 5 will only protect you against a single drive failure, more if you have more redundant disks in the array. But you still need to be ready for entire array failure, fire, theft, corruption etc. I lost an entire Buffalo Terastation a few years back as a power blip caused the unit to loose its network config and its IP became 0.0.0.0 and there was no way to set this without it having a valid network address. Meant the entire array was lost. But I had backups.

Our current setup is a RAID 5 array for our master editing system (we use Synology Diskstation units) which backups us all current projects to a USB attached drive.

That has a real time replication of everything except the video source files to another NAS offsite. We don't use the internet for transferring the video files, just too slow so we do that manually with a hard drive. That also performs backups but once a week rather than daily.

So if we delete something by mistake, save a project by mistake we can go back to a point in time.

A full write up is on our blog

Storage and Backups for Small Businesses ?*Minty Slippers

There are very few scenarios we arent protected against and it does help me sleep better. Just imagine how sick you would feel when you get that hard drive fail and you loose a clients wedding. Thats when you check your insurance is valid :)

As for replacing drives I would say there is no need to have a replacement program. Chances are every 5 years you will maybe look to increase your capacity anyway to meet your growing business needs and its then you replace them.

We use WD Red drives. Designed for constant running in NAS units. They run cooler for longer life, handle vibration better and have great transfer speeds.

Hi Danny!

Thanks for this informative post!!

Scary that you lost an entire system! That's why I'm moving towards a Thunderbolt 2 editing station, with a Synology server running as its back up, with both systems working in RAID 5.

Spending £500 for 10TB of offsite data seems expensive, but with two years cover, it's not so bad. I may look into adding iDrive, though it's another thing to eat into your profits.

My system also includes a UPS (I basically copied as much of your old blog post as I could when I first started out).

My back up system is currently:
4TB Thunderbolt 1 RAID 0 editing station
20TB Synology Server with UPS attached running in RAID 5

Every wedding I shoot goes first onto the editing station that evening, and then the footage is transferred to the Synology server overnight. That way, I always have three copies of their film, from the SD cards, to the editing station, to the NAS.

I'll soon use a RAID 5 editing station with similar storage to my NAS. I most likely won't use the USB ports in the back of the Synology server to back up that way, I'm more likely to use the iDrive long term. I've only shot six weddings thus far though, so I think my back up system is pretty good for a start up, and will be solid long term.

I'm 'happy' to lose my week's editing, but I do want to have a system to ALWAYS protect my footage, which is why I may opt to have an 8TB hard drive that's kept at a relatives, rather than pay for an online service. Each wedding that I shoot, I go to my relatives, take my hard drive, make a duplicate copy of the footage onto that drive, and then take it back the next day. I feel that's more affordable than using iDrive and backing up 300GB after every wedding that you shoot?

*EDIT* Getting Tave Studio Manager tomorrow as well, Danny - I know you raved about it, so I'm going to make the investment.

[Pete Cofrancesco]

I was thinking of getting 4tb but wanted a reliable one. I saw this article https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-...s-for-q2-2015/ Seagate looks awful and HGST good but Amazon reviews indicate the opposite. I'm not sure if this is do to an article skewing to sell a manufacturer or consumers giving premature good reviews based on limited time of ownership or enterprise vs consumer use. But I am aware of negative Seagate buzz.

Does rpm matter anymore 7200 vs 5400?

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Pete Cofrancesco

Does rpm matter anymore 7200 vs 5400?

Absolutely! If you want higher performance you need 7200rpm. You may not need highest performance though if just using the drives for archiving rather than editing so if you are looking at lower cost per GB you might choose the slower drives.

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Craig McKenna

I'm 'happy' to lose my week's editing

You should never lose a week's editing or even a day's editing. You only need to copy the project file to the cloud to protect your work. Render files etc can be recreated. All you need to continue with your work is a copy of the project file & copies of the raw footage.

[Anthony McErlean]

After a days editing I always backup my project folder to an external drive.

[Dan Burnap]

I have all my non-footage \ project files backed up on Google Drive and a backup hard disk. 3 Copies of the data.

Once back from a shoot I used Shotput Pro to copy it to my main project drive and two back up disks which are put in seperate rooms (off-site would be too much of a hassle)

So I always have three copies of all of my data. Just last week a client requested (paid) changes to a project that had been signed off and deleted from my main project disk. I retrieved my first back up disk to find it unresponsive. Then I went and got my second back up disk, corrupted. Lucky I had also edited this project on my laptop and there was still a copy on that. Close one!

[Craig McKenna]

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

You should never lose a week's editing or even a day's editing. You only need to copy the project file to the cloud to protect your work. Render files etc can be recreated. All you need to continue with your work is a copy of the project file & copies of the raw footage.

Hi Nigel,

I'll be honest, I know that I always create a new Library for every project that I create in FCPX, but once I optimise my footage, these Libraries become insane in size. When people mention the project file being backed up, I would obviously have the RAW footage as well (as that's already on two separate drives), so do you simply copy the project by selecting it, CMD + C to copy and paste into the Finder of the drive that you wish to use? I have looked online (not greatly), but I cannot find a simple solution for this. I think I've found a video, so I will watch that later. Thanks for giving me the impetus. I really do care about the client's footage as much as the next videographer, but I've never had the same respect for my own time - as long as the couple's footage is safe, I can sleep.