Are you doing enough to protect your digital assets?

[Samuel Bilodeau]

Two weeks ago I published a blog post on our company blog addressing the relative merits of using checksums alone as the primary means of protecting our digital footage. It generated a lively discussion here on Reduser, and right from the get go I'd promised a follow-up post with recommendations about what we should be doing instead/in addition to checksumming if we really care about protecting our digital assets.

I don't know about you, but we here at Mystery Box have lost data, and have had many friends and associates who have lost data for a variety of reasons. We don't want to see that happen to anyone - not only in DIT transfer process, but throughout the whole post-production workflow and beyond. So we've put together a set of "Best Practice" recommendations and advice that can reduce the risk of data loss to almost nothing. You can find it here:

http://www.mysterybox.us/blog/2017/7/21/protecting-your-digital-assets-part-2-best-practices

In it I present five recommendations for protecting against the enemies of our digital data: unrecoverable read errors, hardware damage or failure, and human error. In summary, these are:

1. Using manufacturer recommended hardware for speed and reliability.
2. Offloading your assets immediately to a RAID 5 or 6 to reduces the odds of loss from corruption, hardware failure, damage or loss.
3. Creating two copies immediately before wiping your camera cards, on different storage devices, and expanding that to two archival copies that are never touched as soon as possible
4. Using new magnetic tape for archival backups, or new hard drives if tape is not an option, for the longevity recoverability of magnetic media.
5. Creating a culture that allows for, but protects against, failure.

And stemming from our discussion about my first post here on Reduser, I added a postscript section offering some miscellaneous DIT advice.

We'd love to hear your feedback on the recommendations, especially on points where we may disagree!

 

[Wayne Morellini]

Thanks.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Some great information at the Mystery Box website.

 

[Marcus Friedlander]

]Creating a culture that allows for, but protects against, failure.

This is a really interesting way to phrase it. Thank you for the read! Lots of great information!