How do you guys back up your content?

I have given thought to this several times about backing up content, and it seems that there are several methods. This posting for prefered may be a little late, we will see how well my hard drive can be recovered :) but....LOL

For videos what I usually do is edit them to how I am going to use them, whether it is for web, or DVD, then I delete the raw files off of my computer, and just keep the DV tape as a backup.

On stills, well, I have really never backed them up, as I have NEVER in my life had a hard drive fail. Now fast forward to this weekend, my computer isn't reading my hard drive, I have no idea what is going on with it, but I am having someone come take a look at it.

My question is this, when I have given thought in the past to backing up images files what do you do? Do you get an external hard drive? Make disks with the image sets on them? With important documents and such, I usually will put them on a disk, to have a hard copy just in case, same with 2257 info, its all on disks as well as my hard drive.

So what methods do you guys use?

We use an external harddrive.

I have personally have had 4 Western Digital drives die on me! I switched to Maxtor drives and they are great. Back to topic...I actually use an external drive and for archiving I use dvds stored in a different location (in case of fire...theft...whatever)!

Lee

One more thing Dean...I did get one of those Western Digital drives recovered from a recovery service. They recovered EVERYTHING and although it cost me $600 for a 100 gig drive it SAVED me thousands in content that I would have lost! If you need the info on that service I can look it up for you (don't have it right at my finger tips at the moment).

Good luck!

Lee

I burn a disk for each foto set or video and use an external hard drive as well.

I won't give the keys away to our method of archiving but will tell you that we have everything archived in multiple climate controlled sites locally and nationally in the event of natural disasters of epic proportion!

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Originally Posted by A_DeAngelo

I won't give the keys away to our method of archiving but will tell you that we have everything archived in multiple climate controlled sites locally and nationally in the event of natural disasters of epic proportion!

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I just got back from buying a new computer! It was a bitch to find one how I wanted it, with XP still... I took the hard drive out of my old one, with the files in question, put them in an external case and all is there.

We will note this huge scare as lesson learned, time to archive everything, and keep it in multiple places :)

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Originally Posted by deanb

I just got back from buying a new computer! It was a bitch to find one how I wanted it, with XP still... I took the hard drive out of my old one, with the files in question, put them in an external case and all is there.

We will note this huge scare as lesson learned, time to archive everything, and keep it in multiple places :)

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I had an expandable memory chip go bad on my computer last week... mimmicked hard drive problems in a way. I swapped it for one from my sons computer and problem solved :thumbsup:

Lesson learned.. back up everything

We store everything also within our offices and I just got two new terra of disk space for the some smaler stuff. Of course all web hdd drives are running on raid, so we are more or less a bit saver

We've been through the ringer with data loss and hard drive failures. What we have is an expensive solution, but it was designed to grow with us.

We built a Linux-based media server running two 2TB (2000 gig) hardware RAID-5 arrays (4 - 750gig drives in one, 3- 750 gig drives in the other, with one hot spare.) These arrays hold all of the edited AVI (full res) and WMV (web-encoded) videos as well as stills and screencaps. If a drive in either array were to fail, the hot spare would kick in and rebuild the array without any user interaction from us, then we'd just have to replace the bad drive. This media server cost us about $3,000 to build, but it's fast enough that we can edit and render directly to and from the media server.

Then, for secondary backup, all the stills are stored on a Terastation software-based RAID-5 1TB box.

We also have an SDLT tape backup that will (soon) have a complete backup of the entire media server, and all of our unedited HD video content is also stored on SDLT, since it's too large to fit on any other media or to keep online (roughly 1.5 gigs/minute of video.) Edited HD video is stored on the media server. The backup tapes will have two sets offsite and one onsite.

We spent a fortune doing all this, but our content is our lifeblood, and so we considered it to be a reasonable investment for our security.

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Originally Posted by deanb

I just got back from buying a new computer! It was a bitch to find one how I wanted it, with XP still... I took the hard drive out of my old one, with the files in question, put them in an external case and all is there.

We will note this huge scare as lesson learned, time to archive everything, and keep it in multiple places :)

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I think the coolest thing ever was when one of our banks moved from one location (in the Beverly Center) to their new office in downtown Beverly Hills. Since we had everything stored in our box in the vault, we were scared that the contents would be spilled all over La Cienega as they backed the vault in pieces out of the bank...!

Needless to say, the entire operation was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. The boxes were all loaded (in massive sections) onto a caravan of high security brinks trucks and whisked away - I thought it was very cool to see our library (under such high security - armed guards) being transported through the streets of BH with no one really paying any attention to the operation!

Nothing like moving the family jewels...

reminds me of the old days when I used to have sex in the bank vault of our families old bank on California - they actually had wood paneled rooms with conference tables where you could "meat and greet" in private during "lunch"

Here's what I do, and when I go to a company I insist that they do this or I may very well not work there.

Ounique has the host (obvious) they have a backup.

my "working Hard drive" (ie: the one i do my daily stuff) is backed up on two drives that are ONLY for that.

Ounique's Archive is backed up 3 ways.
I have two external hard drives for back up, it's backed up on two diffrent servers.

and once in a while every other week I run a tape backup and a DVD burn just in case. Call me paranoid but point is this.

Nothing will be lost.

here's something funny, Babenet.com is gone however their backups still remain =-p