Backup Solutions for Media Producers

It’s true for any industry, but especially computer users in the media production field- if you do not have a backup solution in place for your computer systems and all of your media assets, you are sitting on a ticking time bomb. It’s not a matter of IF, but of WHEN you will have a hard drive crash. Not having a backup solution in place as a media producer is like not changing the oil on your vehicle.- it is a virtual kiss of death. Stop and take 30 seconds to ponder on how many hours, DAYS in fact, that you have spent on recording, editing, chroma keying, post-production, rendering, etc. Now imagine, no really; right now, imagine the gut-wrenching feeling you would have if you sat down in your studio only to find that those media assets are missing or corrupted, or maybe it’s JUST the configuration settings of your most used apps. How would you finish that one project you are currently working on, not to mention reference any media assets for future projects? How many deadlines would you miss? How many potential clients would you lose while you are attempting to salvage your work environment? Again, the thought of losing your data in ANY field, such as a common office environment, is a sickening feeling. But it is exponentially worse as a producer in the media field due to the hours of time spent on media projects. I’m a very optimistic person, but I’m also a realist. I’m not trying to point out the worse case scenario. I’m pointing out the inevitable scenario. You MUST have a backup solution TODAY. Don’t put it off another day.

What needs to be backed up? What constitutes a real backup solution to protect your assets?

What to backup:

1. Main internal hard-drive – OS, apps, configurations, and typically your contacts and email.

2. Media assets – raw recordings, effects, plug-ins, project files, fully rendered video, etc. If you feel its important enough to keep on your external “media” hard drive, its important enough to backup.

The common rule of thumb is if you don’t have three copies, you don’t have a backup.

The first of the three copies of your data, of course, is your main hard drive(s) including external hard drives used for mass storage of media files used in projects and that must be readily available for those projects.

The second of the three copies is usually on site and can consist of either a separate external hard drive or DVD data discs and is used strictly for the purposes of backup storage. If you are a Mac user and you don’t have a 1 Tb external drive setup as your “Time Machine”, it’s time to drop $99 on the 1 Tb drive and turn on the Time Machine software included with Mac OS X. Within the first few months of owning my Macbook, due to some faulty non-Apple RAM, I crashed my internal hard drive. I literally purchased a 1 Tb hard drive and made a Time Machine backup the day before the crash. It saved my business from total failure. I got lucky. Don’t wait for some day. Do it today. This will allow you to put the OS, apps, configurations, etc. back into place as if nothing happened within hours or less of the crash and replacing or formatting your internal hard drive. Cheap hardware + free software = saved business. Don’t learn this lesson the hard way. Wisdom is learning from other people’s failures without having to experience the failure yourself.

To make a backup of your external drive(s) to your on site backup drive for Mac OS X, you can use software such as Carbon Copy Cloner . It is “free to use until you trust them” (a.k.a. freeware, please donate). For Windows users, try HDClone. The key to choosing a software package is to ensure that you can backup from one external drive to another, and have the ability to schedule those backups to run automatically. If you depend on your memory to manually backup your data, it won’t be done effectively if at all. Don’t trust yourself as part of your backup solution.

Having a second external copy (hard drive or DVD data disc) of your data on site will give you the ability to recover data back to your main hard drive(s) and restore your work environment to full functionality quickly.

The third of the three copies needs to be off site. In the old days, that meant backing up to a tape drive and shipping the tapes off site to a climate controlled media storage facility equipped with fire suppression. But things have changed for the better in this wonderful age of technology in which we live. Thanks to the Internet, the age of “Cloud Computing” and readily available high-speed Internet connections, meeting the requirement for off site storage of one of your copies has become much easier than the older method of shipping tapes off site. Online backup comes in many flavors. Do a Google search for online backup and you’ll find plenty to choose from. The most commonly advertised online backup company is Carbonite. I personally tried them first because it was the first one I’d heard of due to the advertising. However, I chose not to go with their online backup service based on one major lack of a feature. Carbonite, although its not obvious on their website, does not backup external drives (hard drives, CD/DVD, USB “thumb” drives, etc.) This is huge requirement for implementing this backup solution. You must be able to backup all of your important data to an off site (online) storage regardless of whether its an internal hard drive or one of the many flavors of external storage as mentioned above. This led me to iDrive. This service allows you to back up any drive attached to your computer including mapped network drives and USB “thumb” drives. They have a “basic” free service plan that gives you up to 2GB of storage. This is obviously for trying out the service. You may be able to store your important internal hard drive information with 2GB, but it’s obviously not enough to backup your media assets. You can purchase 150Gb of storage for $49.50 per YEAR, or 500GB of storage for $149.50 per year. The iDrive software allows you to choose what specific folders or files you wish to backup and has a scheduler for automatic backups. It also can run in “incremental backup” mode which is constantly monitoring your drive(s) for files that change, and immediately sends the changed file(s) to the online backup servers. The iDrive service is available for Windows and Mac OS X.

Having an offsite backup gives you the ability to recover data back to your work environment after a catastrophic event such as a fire, flood, or hurricane.

Although not officially part of a backup plan, two solutions for keeping a quick copy of fairly small amounts of data that you may need to quickly retrieve from virtually any location is Dropbox and Evernote. Both are Internet based systems and allow you to quickly store and retrieve data from multiple devices.

Dropbox is for storing files (or sharing files with others) using simple drag and drop within the Finder (or Windows Explorer). Dropbox apps are also available for iPhone, iPad, Anroid, and soon on BlackBerry devices. See www.dropbox.com for details.

Evernote is for storing information (i.e. text, audio notes, small video notes, and photographs such as a business card). The text that you type as well as the text on photos is indexed and easily searchable at a later date. Notes within your Evernote account are accessible via the Evernote.com website or apps running on your Windows or Mac computer, iPhone, iPad, or other mobile devices. See www.Evernote.com for details.