304: TECHTALK - BACKUP WORKFLOW

As a Filmeditor and Photographer it's inevitable that hard drive space is reaching it's limits pretty fast. I fill up the gigabytes pretty quick. So what do I use and what's my storage workflow?

Disclaimer: You've probably read a bunch of blogpost like this, therefore there a thousands of approaches to this topic. And this is why this is "just my approach", it has flaws and isn't the best, just mine ;-)

Click on the link to read the rest of the blog post...

Let's start with the hardware. I use Lacie Firewire drives and a Drobo 2nd Generation with Western Digital Black Caviar 1 TB drives. I have Lacie D2s, Porsche drives and the rugged. Despite some remarks on the net, that they aren't reliable, I have to say that I just had one crash. And I blame myself for that: That drive was almost seven years old and was more or less just lying around as a backup. I didn't let it spin regularly as I should have I believe.

The rugged drives are of course my travel drives, the Lacie D2 drives are usually used to edit on, but with my current setup not anymore (more on that later), the Porsche USB drives are backup drives, and the Drobo is actually one of my main working drives.

Allright now to the workflow. As I said, the Drobo became my main drive. The MacPro has two internal drives, while one is the system drive the other serves as a scratch drive for editing. On the Drobo I put all the Raw Files, Video Files, final Renders / VideoFiles and more. They all go into a folderstructure based on Photo or Video / Project-type / Date / Client and Projectname. For instance:

Photo/Beauty/2010/100806_Name_Project

Within that folder there are again three folders: RAW-Unedited, SLX-Edit and Final-Tiffs.

Afterwards I backup everything to one of the Lacie drives. There is a dedicated drive for a different backup purpose, i.e. photo backup, video backup, data backup etc.

For the backups I use a programm called Synk. I really like that programm because it is quite customizable. I never tried Timemachine, because it somehow felt too much like a all-in-one solution without the possibility to adjust certain processes.

Well at the end I have all my data on the Drobo raid and a backup on the Lacie Harddrives, so far I am safe...but with one heavy flaw: They are all in one place. That data isn't secure to a fire or theft. But for that I do have another backup at a secure location.

As you see I am quite cautious with my backup workflow. Especially since I just heard a story where a electric blackout in an apartment caused a short circuit and made a backup completely unusable. I'm just too scared about my data. So keep multiple backups and backup often.

But I am quite curious: How are your backup strategies? Or did you already happen to have a serious hard drive crash? Write me a comment below...