Strategy for External Drive Backup

MarcS wrote on 7/20/2004, 6:01 AM
I am a prosumer who just purchased a Western Digital external drive for archiving all my photos, Photoshop, MPEG renders, and assorted video clips.

Previously I've archived my final Vegas renders to tape/DVD and my photos/graphics to CD. I now have a span of material and thought that having an external drive would make things easier. I still plan on using tape for my DV backup but in addition could use the harddrive too.

Could someone suggest what strategies they use for archiving using an external harddrive. Having a solid strategy will help me from making some early misstakes. Also, do you compress your data in backup files or just copy the files without compression?

Thanks,

Marcs

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 7/20/2004, 6:24 AM
Triple redundancy works for me, perhaps a little excessive for most.

1. copy to removable drive.
2. print a copy to DV tape
3. burn a CD/DVD

The odds of all three copies failing are about 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.
MarcS wrote on 7/20/2004, 7:53 AM
BillyBoy,

When you copy to the removable hard drive, do you manually backup each project as avi or mpeg2 files as you complete each proejct or do you use compression backup utility software to automatically copy subdirectories? Also do you backup large avi files on HD or just do the smaller MPEG2 renders?

Thanks,

Marc
apit34356 wrote on 7/20/2004, 8:22 AM
Marc, search for previous threads in the last three weeks, there has been very details posting concerning what, why, how and cost issues with different approaches in project storage.



AJP
MarcS wrote on 7/20/2004, 8:51 AM
Will do.

- Marcs
epirb wrote on 7/20/2004, 5:11 PM
Mark my 2 cent$ worth, if my project is fairly small and the edited clips are some what too, then I save my back up with the copy and trim media option. then can delete the larger capture files.
If the project is larger, what I have been doing is making a tape back up of the origianl tape.and saving the veg that way if I ever need to I can recapture from the orig tape or the dupe.
BillyBoy wrote on 7/20/2004, 10:02 PM
I just use the "save as..." option and render directly to a removable hard drive along with the other methods I mentioned. It works if you're only going to archive FINISHED projects. To archive original source files can get very expensive regardless what method you use if you're going to keep huge uncompressed files around.