Drobo and Premiere Corrupted Mp4 file

[hifocused]

I am editing a wedding off my Drobo with Adobe Premiere and a MP4 file became corrupted.  Luckily I had it backed up and I replaced the file but it's scary that a file would just randomly get corrupted.  I've had this happen once before years ago.  There hasn't been any power outages or any disconnections to damage the file. Just one day it showed lots of blocky artifacts.  Any ideas? I'm worried my drobo could be corrupting other files on the drive.  

It's connected TB 3 to TB 2 into a 2014 iMac.

[RobShultz]

It is strongly recommended that you have your videos on your computer's hard drive.

[hifocused]

These projects are way too big to be on my computer's hard drive.  some are 300-400gb.

[hifocused]

Is it possible Premiere corrupted my file or do you think it's the drobo that did it?

[RobShultz]

I think the workflow that you have is causing the problem. Editing from Drobo.

I'd recommend getting  physical drive (external or internal) to hold your footage and editing from the second drive.

[hifocused]

So I'd just use the drobo as a back up solution to my projects NOT for my editing?

Why is that RAID isn't good for editing or the DROBO is unreliable?

[Warren Heaton]

Files can become corrupted on any storage media.

You're fine editing from external storage as long s the storage media meets the requried sustained data trasnfer rate required to play your video files smoothly.

Drobos, like any RAID, are great for the occasional drive failure, but not for the occasional file become corrupted or even deleted.

It wouldn't hurt to run Disk Utility (included with macOS), TechTool Pro and maybe even DiskWarrior as part of your data maintenance routine.

If you have files that you simply cannot do without, pershaps consider expaning your backup stragy to include cloud storage or some other type of archival media.  I'd lean toward cloud - despite the likely montly fee.  I have files on Exabyte, DLT and LTO as well as CD-R and DVD-R that are not nearly as easy to access as they once were.  Had cloud stroage been available back when I was actively using those formats, that data would be much easier to restore today.

[hifocused]

Thanks for the help so a file left alone on a drive is a lot less likely to be come ccorrupted than one that is actively being used like editing a video?  What about transfer the same file over years from drive to drive as I archive my libary can that corrupt the file over time?

[Warren Heaton]

Since playback is just reading the file, you should be able to play a file indefinitely as long as the storage media does not develop bad sectors (if it's a standard hard drive, it's prone to sectors going bad over time).

While I copy plenty of files via drag and drop, I use Carpon Copy Cloner for migrating larger projects and for mirroring drives for backup.  

I don't use it any more, but Retrospect or something like it is very good for archiving as it does a verification pass checking the copy against the original.

[hifocused]

Okay so there goes my theory that some how Premiere corrupted the file.   Not sure why this happened then. 

Yes I've used CCC before 🙂