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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Best way to archive?

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Daniel Persson

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I am fairly new to the whole red workflow and was just wondering what the best way to archive material is? Would you consider it a mistake if I archive the material on a a single harddisk? I read something about LTO tapes but is it necessary?
 
I am archiving on duplicate 2tb drives while I try to figure out a better long term solution. But the drives are piling up...
 
LTO.

and the term "archive" doesn't apply to hard drives. Hard drives are not considered and archival format FYI. Archival implies being able to sit on a shelf for what we consider a long period of time. At least more than just a couple of years. Hard drives can stop working on you even if you do nothing with it. It's never about IF your hard drive is gonna die, it's always about WHEN. Tape or Film, and kept in a cool dry place.
 
Hey I've got an LTO question. What makes the LTO more stable than any other type of tape medium, a la VHS, miniDV, beta, and so on? Never really thought about it before, but if it's magnetic, isn't it going to degrade as well? Just wondering how it stores better.
 
Well just like anything else, it deals with the level of quality in making the tape. other professional tape formats store very well too, but archiving also implies being able to store at the very least the original acquisition quality that you want. So shooting on red and got to digibeta maybe be archiving a SD solution and creating a SD master, but it wouldn't really be the "true" master tape because you lose quality, and had generational loss on it.

LTO lets you store it as data so it just makes the most sense, no loss in quality, high quality materials to make the tape so if stored in a good environment, could last you over 25 years.

Older formats were made of lower quality, even an old music cassette was terrible because the more you used and played it, the worse your sound got. You are paying over a 100 dollars a tape for a reason with LTO. You can wiki all the extreme tech stuff with it.

Also the debate of optical media and drive media VS tape media has been discussed but the key factors that make TAPE based archival one of the best are the fact that even if something gets damaged on the tape, you can playback or recover SOMETHING. even a vhs that's all worn out will play at least something 10 years later. even if it's degraded with some fuzz spots, you can get something back.

a scratch on a dvd or blu ray and it's done, all the toothpaste in the world won't do anything if the scratch is bad enough, they go bad too. a hard drive can suffer from stickiness and stops pinning, and just corrode over time from ambient moisture. mechanical parts will cease to function eventually. Solid state media may be the next level if capacities rise high enough to be on par with LTO, but the prices would have to go WAY down, and even SSD can suffer from burning out. Tapes are just more to the point, simple, cost effective, and do exactly what you need it to do. Keep your high quality data/material for a long period of time.
 
Mark Phelan said:
Hey I've got an LTO question. What makes the LTO more stable than any other type of tape medium, a la VHS, miniDV, beta, and so on? Never really thought about it before, but if it's magnetic, isn't it going to degrade as well? Just wondering how it stores better.
Click to expand...

In all reality, it's still a spool of magnetic tape in a plastic cartridge. It needs to be handled with care, and safely stored.

If you drop it, the pin can get dislodged and the cartridge will have to be opened.

There is no guarantee yet that an LTO tape will last the 15-30 years that is claimed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Tape_durability

LTO tapes also have limited backwards compatibility. LTO 5 can read/write to LTO5 & LTO 4, but read only LTO3.

This means LTO 1 & 2 tapes will need to be migrated to newer generations to maintain compatibilty.

I think the other issue that hasn't been resolved is how the archive is done. Some people use proprietary software like Retrospect and Tolis Bru, which is fine if staying in-house.

If tapes need to be read by someone else during the production or years later, then a more universal format needs to be used. A lot of vfx/post houses have been using TAR for years since it's free and non-proprietary.

I feel archive have to be thought out for the long term, where masters should be migrated from one format to a better one every so many years.
 
the nature of the beast. HDCAM SR is considered a mastering/archiving medium. but how many people can afford the deck? and limited at 1080p. no solution is bullet proof, not even film, if it's important to you, you just do your best with it. the methods aren't perfect but still very good, and you gotta go with what you have. When we can start putting everything on a indestructible crystal prism, we will. Until then...
 
Our cupoards are full with harddiscs (500GB and 1 TB) and we never had a problem. Of course a harddisc could crash. But than we have to invest 1000 Euros for a data recovery - that`s the only risk. Very important projects are stored twice on 2 separate discs (and on our server too) A simple USB-slot conected to the mac lets us read the data fast enough for previewing and the transfer to the internal raid.

Cheers

Thomas.
 
I have an HD cam deck and I have considered laying back to tape everything that I think might have future use from a project. Archiving the whole project is a different story, but I have been toying with the idea of using HDcam for footage I would consider useful as stock footage in the future. For instance, we are about to go and shoot the Taj Mahal. I don't know if archiving the talking heads is really useful, but the footage in India would be. And of course the master tapes remain.

I have not been encouraged by all the commentary about LTO tapes. Its expensive, the archival life is uncertain, the backward compatibility is an issue.

I had to go back and retrieve some ancient business records from floppy discs and I could only do it with an antique Mac that still booted and worked. But it was a miracle and an accident that I still had that old machine.
 
well what's the difference in hard drives? what would have been the difference in putting footage on a PATA hard drive, and then transfering it over to sata later? Yeh there are some cheap solutions just to hook up the drive, but it's all gonna get phased out soon. It's just the nature of the technology. People who had their masters on D5 15 years ago, are all having to transfer to SR now, before that it was an older deck, older format. Storage is always changing, and there is no perfect solution right now. But at the moment LTO is a standard for data backup and archiving. Is it perfect? No, but it's still good, and expense is relative.

The initial investment in the LTO drive is considerable, but the tapes for space wise, is reasonable. And as far as always make new backups, it all amounts to the same thing if you are doing tha twith hard drives every few years. But the point is, you have a better chance of your LTO tape being in good shape for when you need to re transfer, the likelihood that,t he drive you have to reback has a lower percentage of still working. And the need to offset that percentage buy having MORE backups, is defeating the purpose of "archiving" and "mastering".
 
All good points, Tom. But there is a lot of time associated with archiving onto LTO tapes (and someone's salary while they do it) and there is the whole business of keeping track of the actual archived material (logs or archive data) as time goes by, and hard drives are fast and simple to deal transfer data on and it is a technology that is easy to transfer off of, at least for now.

But to be honest, I am only using the hard drives as an excuse to avoid making a difficult long-term decision, perhaps hoping that a better solution will present itself. I am noticing that a better solution has not presented itself, however...
 
so what you are saying is it's dangerous to put material on a disc for a long term archive. I guess this aplies to any material or data?
 
Currently there is no such thing as a "final" solution for backing up data.

There are different media solutions with different safety aspects and convenience "grades" and, off course, storage size.

HDs are the leaders in storage size and convenience.

LTO is the best when safety is important.

All other option are either not secure enough or just not deliver enough storage.

Therefore we go this route:

All camera footage gets copied to a big Raid which is a R6 protected giving you 8.5 out of 10 points regarding security. The data is also fast and convenient accessible.

A copy of the footage is stored on LTO tapes that sit on a shelf in a different location.

This way you've got both: convenient access and a data security which has 10 out of 10.

When the project is finished the footage on the Raid is copied on normal HDs and erased on the Raid. It still exists two times: HD and LTO. The projects files are treated the same way.

The thing with backups is currently that one has to think about it like kneading dough. You have to copy it actively every other year or so to a new, more advanced medium. Pretty tedious. But this is the current state.

IMO, data management and backup data is a problem that costs time and money and rarely finds itself adequately in a budget.

Hans
 
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