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Archiving footage


Vital Butinar

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Hey guys!

Here's a question for some of you that might work on bigger projects and handle your own footage.

How do you store your footage long term. 

Until we bought the Pocket 4K I used to store stuff that we had shot on external drives. But lately we've had so much to edit that external drives just aren't cutting it anymore and I've been thinking of implementing a storage system with around 48TB of storage (RAID 5) and an PostgreSQL database to hold the footage and the database (Davinci Resolve db) of the projects so that more than one person can work on the same project at the same time.

How do some of you handle these things?

Am I going along this the wrong way or am I thinking in the right direction?

Regards to everyone, hope you're doing ok

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You know what Perry will say...LTO tape.

Within the digital realm there are only 2 methods of archival preservation.

M-Disc

Laser engraved synthetic quartz

The quartz is not a mainstream method as of yet. I used to use all sort of things, mainly lots of small hard drives. While I still use HDD for interim work, everything eventually gets put on M-Discs. I've done a tremendous amount of archival testing on optical media over the last 20 years. 

SDD is no good for archival storage unless you keep them charged up. If not charged they are said to lose data in less than a year. And even if they lasted 3 or 4 years uncharged, not very archival.

Here is how I organize my M-Discs.

https://danieldteolijrarchivalcollection.wordpress.com/2020/09/20/organizing-an-m-disc-archive/

Don't like M-Disc? You can use gold MAM-A discs, but they are not that much better than AZO silver discs.

https://danieldteolijrarchivalcollection.wordpress.com/2018/10/09/gold-dvds-are-better-than-silver-dvds-at-least-somewhat/

Some VCD held up pretty good surprisingly. You would think DVD to be better than CD. I've had some silver CD's hold data better than silver AZO DVD. The blue dyed CD's are not that good for light fastness.

https://danieldteolijrarchivalcollection.wordpress.com/2019/01/14/15-year-cd-r-archival-burn-test/

But no matter how you slice it...nothing at all compares to M-Disc for archival preservation of digital data. 

https://daniel-d-teoli-jr-archival-collection-ii.home.blog/2019/10/23/nothing-can-compare-to-the-m-disk-when-it-comes-to-digital-archiving/

And don't let the Debby Downers tell you that optical media is dead or wont be readable. I'm still using CD's I bought in the 1980's and no sign of not being able to get drives to read or burn them 40 years later.

Just make multiple optical disc copies on different media types to be sure. Sometimes a cheap disc may delaminate. I've never had any M-Disc delaminate as yet. 

https://archive.org/search.php?query=delamination teoli

Good luck!

 

Edited by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.
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1 hour ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

You know what Perry will say...LTO tape.

Within the digital realm there are only 2 methods of archival preservation.

M-Disc

Laser engraved synthetic quartz

The quartz is not a mainstream method as of yet. I used to use all sort of things, mainly lots of small hard drives. While I still use HDD for interim work, everything eventually gets put on M-Discs. I've done a tremendous amount of archival testing on optical media over the last 20 years. 

SDD is no good for archival storage unless you keep them charged up. If not charged they are said to lose data in less than a year. And even if they lasted 3 or 4 years uncharged, not very archival.

Here is how I organize my M-Discs.

https://danieldteolijrarchivalcollection.wordpress.com/2020/09/20/organizing-an-m-disc-archive/

Don't like M-Disc? You can use gold MAM-A discs, but they are not that much better than AZO silver discs.

https://danieldteolijrarchivalcollection.wordpress.com/2018/10/09/gold-dvds-are-better-than-silver-dvds-at-least-somewhat/

Some VCD held up pretty good surprisingly. You would think DVD to be better than CD. I've had some silver CD's hold data better than silver AZO DVD. The blue dyed CD's are not that good for light fastness.

https://danieldteolijrarchivalcollection.wordpress.com/2019/01/14/15-year-cd-r-archival-burn-test/

But no matter how you slice it...nothing at all compares to M-Disc for archival preservation of digital data. 

https://daniel-d-teoli-jr-archival-collection-ii.home.blog/2019/10/23/nothing-can-compare-to-the-m-disk-when-it-comes-to-digital-archiving/

And don't let the Debby Downers tell you that optical media is dead or wont be readable. I'm still using CD's I bought in the 1980's and no sign of not being able to get drives to read or burn them 40 years later.

Just make multiple optical disc copies on different media types to be sure. Sometimes a cheap disc may delaminate. I've never had any M-Disc delaminate as yet. 

https://archive.org/search.php?query=delamination teoli

Good luck!

 

Thanks Daniel for replying.

I actually know M disk and I've even used it last year and I think it's a great idea for storing long term stuff.

I did actually store finished projects and things like accompanying art, documentation and even edits on the M disks but unfortunately they're too small for raw footage because in some cases I can't even fit one clip onto one disk.

Once upon a time before going into filmmaking I had a successful IT company and had a bunch of servers running at my office and even archiving stuff to LTO tapes. So I've been looking into that now that we're expanding our filmmaking a little but at the same time wouldn't want to go overboard since servers use a lot of juice and tend to run up electric bills fairly fast if they're running for no reason. 

I've been looking for a small NAS with 4 to 6 bays and just using that but when I calculate the cost compared to using a server that I've already got and just changing the drives I get discouraged again and start thinking I'd do that. But then again I start thinking what about the noise and the power consumption and I get caught in a loop again.

If I knew that a year from now we'd be editing a bunch of stuff and having three to four people editing regularly and shooting projects all the time I'd go for a full storage system but since it's just a two person operation for now I'm torn between what to do.

I do love the ability to have the editing database on a server which is great for backups also.

And what amazed me was about two weeks ago I plugged an old sata hdd into a usb 2.0 hub and edited a project shot in braw last year and the thing worked flawlessly. I couldn't believe it and started thinking again that maybe all this could work over the network. 

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  • 2 months later...

Another option is the Sony Optical Disc Archive. Depending on the model, the cartridge's hold up to 5.5TB of data. But they are pricey machines.

Cold Data Storage Technology - Sony Pro

Sometimes you can pick up one of their earlier models a lot cheaper used, but it only holds 1.5TB per cartridge or 3.3TB

sony optical disc archive | B&H Photo Video

 

Edited by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.
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41 minutes ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Another option is the Sony Optical Disc Archive. Depending on the model, the cartridge's hold up to 5.5TB of data. But they are pricey machines.

Cold Data Storage Technology - Sony Pro

Sometimes you can pick up one of their earlier models a lot cheaper used, but it only holds 1.5TB per cartridge or 3.3TB

sony optical disc archive | B&H Photo Video

 

See now this is a good solution. I just wish it wasn't that pricey. 

But I think for now drives will keep the bulk of the data and then later a NAS.

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  • Premium Member

Has Sony upgraded the Optical Disc Archive system recently?

I looked at it years ago and it was completely uncompetitive with LTO in terms of cost, speed and capacity, a real lame duck of a format unless you needed some amazingly specific things.

P

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1 hour ago, Phil Rhodes said:

Has Sony upgraded the Optical Disc Archive system recently?

I looked at it years ago and it was completely uncompetitive with LTO in terms of cost, speed and capacity, a real lame duck of a format unless you needed some amazingly specific things.

P

I used to have LTO on a couple of my servers. It was effective but it was years ago. 

The Sony solutions does look expensive. 

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