Saturday, August 06, 2005
Movie Backups:
I recently had the unfortunate experience of losing many, many hours of work on edited movies already completed. It happened a bit like this: I back up all of my work at intervals, but when doing movies, it's a real waste to use up an entire DVD each time you complete a segment. So.... I waited, until I had enough to fill one complete DVD. (creating DVD's is the way I used to backup the files).
A simpleton could figure that you are liable to lose up to almost one DVD full....which is exactly what happened.
The alternatives are to waste a DVD every time you create or edit a movie segment (a CD won't hold these files), or to invest in something better. I could have already told you the downside of relying on DVD's as backups: 1) they are slow to write, 2) they cost extra money for each disk, 3) it's laborious to create a DVD each time you finish a segment, 4) because of all the trouble, you tend to skip doing it for awhile, 5) after awhile you have a TON of DVD's, each with one or two segments on it, a real hassle to organize and track.
So, doing what I should have done much earlier, I went out and bought an external hard drive. You may as well buy the biggest one you can find---movies are huge, and once you have such a handy device, you'll want to back up other files as well. I bought a Seagate 160 Gigabyte drive. It is USB2 only. I think a combination USB2/Firewire HDD would be better, but more expensive. I got the Seagate at our local WalMart for about $150. Expensive, but at a dollar an hour for all the labor I lost.
With a hard drive, it's a simple matter to copy the file from an internal hard drive onto the external one as soon as it's completed. Simple means you may actually DO it!
Here's another suggestion, made by my friend, Sam. He said, "never use a video tape twice." IN other words, what is originally recorded on it, stays. It provides another sort of security, albeit for the roughest form of unedited movies. Still, had I followed his advice, I would not have permanently lost many minutes of irreplaceable movies.
So, as they say, it's not IF you'll lose your data, it's WHEN. One more person telling you to BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP.
I recently had the unfortunate experience of losing many, many hours of work on edited movies already completed. It happened a bit like this: I back up all of my work at intervals, but when doing movies, it's a real waste to use up an entire DVD each time you complete a segment. So.... I waited, until I had enough to fill one complete DVD. (creating DVD's is the way I used to backup the files).
A simpleton could figure that you are liable to lose up to almost one DVD full....which is exactly what happened.
The alternatives are to waste a DVD every time you create or edit a movie segment (a CD won't hold these files), or to invest in something better. I could have already told you the downside of relying on DVD's as backups: 1) they are slow to write, 2) they cost extra money for each disk, 3) it's laborious to create a DVD each time you finish a segment, 4) because of all the trouble, you tend to skip doing it for awhile, 5) after awhile you have a TON of DVD's, each with one or two segments on it, a real hassle to organize and track.
So, doing what I should have done much earlier, I went out and bought an external hard drive. You may as well buy the biggest one you can find---movies are huge, and once you have such a handy device, you'll want to back up other files as well. I bought a Seagate 160 Gigabyte drive. It is USB2 only. I think a combination USB2/Firewire HDD would be better, but more expensive. I got the Seagate at our local WalMart for about $150. Expensive, but at a dollar an hour for all the labor I lost.
With a hard drive, it's a simple matter to copy the file from an internal hard drive onto the external one as soon as it's completed. Simple means you may actually DO it!
Here's another suggestion, made by my friend, Sam. He said, "never use a video tape twice." IN other words, what is originally recorded on it, stays. It provides another sort of security, albeit for the roughest form of unedited movies. Still, had I followed his advice, I would not have permanently lost many minutes of irreplaceable movies.
So, as they say, it's not IF you'll lose your data, it's WHEN. One more person telling you to BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP.
