Backup Strategies for Video Production Pros

A Walk In The Cloud

The Cloud is a big buzzword these days. Services like Dropbox, Google's GDrive (formerly Google Docs), Apple's iCloud, and Amazon's Cloud service (along with many others) provide Internet-connected storage for our growing collection of stuff. I'm reminded of the George Carlin comedy routine where your house is a place to store your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. If the hard drive is your house full of stuff, then these cloud services are like U-Store-It locations where you can save more stuff without having to leave your house-full-of-stuff.

As media producers, we're used to dealing with 16GB, 32GB, 64GB cards full of footage and hard drives with multiple terabytes of capacity. The connection to these cloud services is only as fast as the upload speed of your Internet connection. This is almost always slower than your download speed. It might take you 1-3 days to upload just one card of data to a cloud service, and weeks or more to upload an entire drive. Don't forget that your Internet provider will likely have a cap on how much data you can send up the wire, no matter that it is data you created and are sending to a service you paid for.

Personally I think cloud services are great; the last Vegas Pro book I worked on as a technical editor was created entirely in Google Docs and it was a wonderful experience. I think the cloud works very well for small music collections, office-type documents, and project files such as the .veg and .dar files we use with Vegas and DVD Architect.

In my opinion, these are not a realistic choice for raw footage or other large amounts of data. I know of video pros using Carbonite for their offsite/cloud storage but at this time we've chosen not to. However, we now have an office outside of our home to facilitate offsite storage. Many video companies are working from home offices and cloud storage makes more sense in situations like that.

If you do choose to use a service like GDrive, you can configure SyncToy to copy the files you want to back up into your watch folder and GDrive will immediately start to upload the new files across the net. Be careful though, that if/when you delete files from the cloud GDrive location that your local media isn't deleted too, if that's not the behavior you want.

Aftermath

I hope you have viewed this article as a cautionary tale. And thank goodness the project had been delivered, because losing a drive sucks. What sucks even worse is the evaluation report we got back from Seagate. The cost to recover the data on that drive? $2,400, the top end of their estimates (of course).

There are other, possibly cheaper data recovery services, but the point has been made. If it was covered by insurance I'd get the data recovered. If I knew we wouldn't ever need anything that's on the drive, I'd have it replaced under warranty (and lose the data). If I'd had automated backups none of this would have happened. If ... if ... if ...

Instead, Seagate is returning it as is. I'm putting the drive--with a sticker reading "$2,400"--on the shelf above my desk so I'll be forced to look at it every day.

You can bet I've learned my lesson.