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kdoc2
Inspiring
May 29, 2017
Question

Backups

  • May 29, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 215 views

In a recent discussion I've been helped with tightening up my "Save-As" practices. It now occurs to me I could use help with keeping a good offline entire project backup.

1. I believe I can save a project to another drive, perhaps offline, (i.e. all of its asset files and the ongoing *.prprog files) either by copying its entire folder as is, or by making a "Collection.": Is one preferable over the other?

2. But as the days then go by, I might add clips to the project, and continue working on it. Don't those each have to be imported into this backup? How do I keep the backup viable so that it responds correctly to the ongoing Saved project files?

3. What I'm asking is, assuming the worst: the working computer crashes and can't be revived, or is stolen. How should I keep a backup which will withstand this highly unfortunate occurance?

Thank you.

kdoc

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    1 reply

    D
    Derjis
    Inspiring
    May 29, 2017

    This is maybe not the most elegant (or cheapest) solution, but we run our projects off of fast internal drives; any primary assets, like footage, sit on SSDs, while the project files are on a fast HDD. Those drives are synced to a NAS, with the "Program Files" drive syncing twice a day (at lunchtime and in the evening), and the "Assets" syncing once per day (the cache files are never synced); "Program Files" are backed up to a cloud service once a day. The NAS is mirrored onto a JBOD array twice a week; every two weeks, the JBOD is backed up offsite onto a RAID5 array.

    If the internal drives fail, we're losing at most a few hours worth of work; the assets don't typically update super frequently, so the likelihood of losing those are pretty slim. If our computers all died, and the NAS hardware went down or somehow lost 3+ drives at the same time, it'd be a pretty big hassle, but the JBOD array could be used to get things up and running again on a single machine. If the place burned to the ground, we'd lose some assets, but could recover most of the work.

    I try to make sure there are 3 copies of everything, including an offsite backup. The easiest thing for you might be to pick up a couple of RAID-capable enclosures, and throw some big HDDs in them. Set your work computer up to sync to one of the enclosures once a day, and make a periodic duplicate of that that you can store at, like, a friend's house.

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