Secure Formating Yes or No

[Adrian Weinbrecht]

We haven't yet performed a secure format with any of our Redmags, we've never had an issue with Red media, but we had 2x hard drives fail the other day (they were duplicates) luckily we had everything backed up on LTO so we recovered from there. So you really can't have too many backups or be too careful.

Some people on Reduser have mentioned doing a secure format as part of a normal maintenance routine.

However the Red media States below:

"SECURE FORMAT MEDIA
Secure format is a low-level format that rebuilds the SSD file system. It should only be used if the performanceof the SSD is in question."

So the question is, should we occasionally do a secure format or not?

Thank you.........

 

[Maik Müller]

Secure format adds some safety, it fixes "hidden" problems with a filesystem, stuff thats not obviously seen but can (worst case) result in corrupted files and some kind of fragmentation.

Do it...
...when your Camera had a in-proper shutdown while recording
...when a computer has written to the REDMAG
...in preparation for a new job
...before/after renting to a customer (otherwise he could recover old footage)
...once in a while

 

[Adrian Weinbrecht]

Secure format adds some safety, it fixes "hidden" problems with a filesystem, stuff thats not obviously seen but can (worst case) result in corrupted files and some kind of fragmentation.

Do it...
...when your Camera had a in-proper shutdown while recording
...when a computer has written to the REDMAG
...in preparation for a new job
...before/after renting to a customer (otherwise he could recover old footage)
...once in a while

Hi Maik

Thanks for your reply, when you say

.....when a computer has written to a Redmag. Does that include things like firmware updates?

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Never did it... Stupid me, I guess, but I have a mag acting up now. I'll try this

 

[Maik Müller]

.....when a computer has written to a Redmag. Does that include things like firmware updates?

Yes, Computers do strange things to filesystems. The filesystem used by RED (FAT32) is a industry-standard and compatible to everything, but it's not the most failure-proof filesystem. I had my episodes with it (not on REDMAGs) and remember how i fiddled around with hex-editors and stuff like that to recover files.

So it might be a bit paranoid, but for important footage my goal is to let the camera only record to REDMAGs that have a fresh filesystem which never have been written to by something else than my camera.

Never did it... Stupid me, I guess, but I have a mag acting up now. I'll try this

Yeah, stuff like that works for a long time and then fails unexpectedly. You will never really notice the advantages of being over-cautious, because it's about avoiding something that maybe could happen if this and that goes wrong, but never happened before and so on.

 

[Naim Sutherland]

The manual needs to be updated to include this information. This is what Red support told me as well:

Secure format adds some safety, it fixes "hidden" problems with a filesystem, stuff thats not obviously seen but can (worst case) result in corrupted files and some kind of fragmentation.

Do it...
...when your Camera had a in-proper shutdown while recording
...when a computer has written to the REDMAG
...in preparation for a new job
...before/after renting to a customer (otherwise he could recover old footage)
...once in a while

 

[TheBied]

The secure format let's the SSD perform some internal house keeping to ensure it's operating at peak performance.

The only draw back is that you will not be able to recover any footage from the SSD after performing the secure format.

 

[Adrian Weinbrecht]

The secure format let's the SSD perform some internal house keeping to ensure it's operating at peak performance.

The only draw back is that you will not be able to recover any footage from the SSD after performing the secure format.

Thanks Matthew

So it sounds like it would make sense to do a secure format as part of your houskeeping/maintenance.

My my thinking now is to secure format at the beginning of each new job. During the job simply format normally as needed. Then before the next job secure format.

Anything that helps data stability is a good idea to me......