![]() ![]() You could knock it over, or spill a cup of coffee into it. The problem is that a RAID only protects against drive failure, which is only one of many ways that you can lose data. It can be tempting to think that storing your data on your RAID gives you an automatic backup. They give you extra transfer speeds, they allow you to combine multiple drives to simplify your setup, and they can also help protect against drive failure. A fire, a flood, an earthquake, even a powerful magnet can destroy all of your backups at once. No matter how many copies of your footage you have, if they are all in the same physical location, your data is very vulnerable. In spite of all of the warnings around the internet, I still see people keeping all of their backups in the same building. Luckily, we had off-site or cloud backups of all of our most important data. They took everything that looked expensive (and most of it was), and we never got any of it back. Tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Your backups are all in one placeĪt my last company, a gang of very professional burglars cleaned out our entire office: laptops, monitors, and (you guessed it) hard drives. Takeaway: Each of your backups should be separate from the others with no cables connecting them. A virus could delete all of the files that your computer has access to, or a strong power surge could fry all of the devices you have connected to the same electrical system. If you have two copies of a file, and they are connected to the same machine (even via a network), you should not consider one of them to be a backup of the other because a single issue could erase them both. You get to make your own decisions, but after reading this article, you will at least be making informed decisions. ![]() If I am doing work for a paying client, however, I will follow all of the principles in this article. If I’m just playing around, shooting a project for fun that I will probably never publish, then I don’t worry so much. It’s always a trade-off between the security of your data and the inconvenience or cost of safety precautions, and the trade-off will depend on the value of your data. The Toy Story example is perhaps the most famous one, but there are hundreds of stories of people losing data because they only had two copies. It’s nearly impossible to calculate the exact likelihood that you will have two drives fail simultaneously because each hard drive model is different, but it definitely happens. What are the chances that two drives will fail? ![]() If your backups are offline, you won’t know if they fail “silently.” Simultaneous failure happens. The backup failed at some unknown point in time, and they only discovered the issue when their main system failed. ![]() Actually, they didn’t fail at exactly the same time. You only have one backupĭid you watch the Pixar video? They nearly lost all of Toy Story 2 (which would have killed Pixar) when both their main system and their backup were lost at the same time. It’s quite entertaining, and it also shows you how real this danger is.Īlright, here are the big mistakes that you need to avoid: 1. This article isn’t going to teach you a comprehensive strategy for how to handle your backups but I will cover what I feel are the most important concepts, listed in priority order. All the time. If you haven’t had a hard drive die on you yet, you’ve probably not been in the business for very long. The culprit is a simple psychological concept: backing up properly requires immediate, clear sacrifices (time and money), in order to protect against an uncertain future scenario. And yet, for some reason, many editors and filmmakers don’t keep robust backups. If you lose your data, you lose your work, and possibly your professional reputation. As filmmakers in the digital age, our data is our most valuable asset. ![]()
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