

I worked on two projects over the span of a week, and the first project was a contracting role where my job was just to shoot and offload the raw footage. The previous way was to keep buying bulky external drives which are not only messy but unorganized and risky! Why I decided to invest in a safer system Nothing ever went wrong but I really do think I was quite lucky, to be honest. This was my solution in the early years and it worked.
QNAS AS USB BACKUP DRIVE PRO
Premiere Pro and After Effects files were set to auto-save into the cloud so in theory, if one hard drive failed, I would have the raw footage on the backup drive and the project files in the cloud. This worked ok for the footage, and there was at least some insurance that if the first hard drive failed, the second one would have all of the raw footage so I wouldn’t lose everything. This added an extra hour to a long shoot day which was not fun! My previous post production backup workflowįor years, after a shoot, I was landing back at my desk and offloading the footage onto a desktop hard drive, waiting for that to finish transferring, and then copying over the raw footage folder onto a second hard drive next to the original one. Read on the learn how I have built this automatic workflow and how you can incorporate it into yours. This provides peace of mind knowing that if, in the rare circumstance that I have TWO drives fail at the same time, I will still have a copy of the video footage.
QNAS AS USB BACKUP DRIVE SOFTWARE
This is done automatically to 3 different backup systems, one with RAID 5 and software that verifies that all the data has been successfully copied, this happens automatically and like clockwork. With the new workflow, whether I’m editing or just copying over raw camera files, all data is synced at the end of the day. There are many solutions to create a reliable backup workflow, this is just one of them and it may not be the right one for you but so far, it’s been a great solution for me. Throughout my career, I have worked on many commercial paid shoots and so far, I have not had any failures or lost data, but the time came where I think I was pushing my luck with my current backup workflow so I decided to bite the bullet and invest in a new system that would provide a safety net for when that day came where things went wrong.

You will sleep much better at night because hard drive failure is not a case of if, but when. If you are being hired as a DP or production company to produce content, you need to minimize your exposure to something going wrong with your data. Losing valuable raw footage or editing assets can be disastrous.īacking up your raw footage and video production assets is definitely not the sexy part of the video production industry and spending that new lens or new light money you have tucked away on a backup solution is easily put off – but trust me, it’s worth it. We have all heard horror stories of lost data, whether it’s accidental or from hardware or software failure. Installing a post production backup workflow is vitally important.
