About File Management-Part 2

In the previous post, About File Management - Part 1,  I talked a little bit about how I name files and why.  Organization is only one part of managing files for your show.  The second part is Back-up.

On the one hand, having multiple versions and a system for organizing them is kind of a form of back-up.  One can make a mistake and still quickly revert to a previous file to 'undo' a mistake. However, backup for disaster recovery is supremely important.  I practice the 3-2-1 bcak-up strategy. It goes something like this:

3 - Back-up copies of anything important
2 - Different media
1 - Off-site copy

Having three copies increases the chance that one will be close by, and that in the event that one of the back-up copies is corrupt, you still have another on which to fall back.

Using two different media is important because the different media types have different MTBF rates (Mean time before failure). It's better not to put all ones eggs in one basket.  There are a couple of scenarios here: Disk to Disk is probably the most common, quick and easy to accomplish and faily inexpensive.  Disk to CD/DVD is a less expensive but a longer process to accomplish and longer to restore. Not all CD/DVD media is created equal.  There are some important things to know about the media and how to store it to maximize it's life. There is an excellent article called 'How To Choose CD/DVD Archival Media' that should be read before purchasing your media. Then there are the 'cloud' options which also satisfy the third rule regarding an Off-site copy.

Offsite copies can also be simply a hard drive that is stored at you house instead of the theatre, or could be as secure as storing DVD's or CD in a safe deposit box at a bank.  I like using a cloud storage method for whatever I am working on right now and move to an archive storage soultion once the project or show is completed.

There a bunch of cloud storage and backup products available out there.  From Mozy and Carbonite for focused cloud backup solutions to DropBox and JungleDisk for a folder sync and cloud storage type backup.  Dropbox is good and available on just about every platform, but they recently changed their Terms of Service to say that they can unencrypt and share your stuff if asked to.  Jungledisk uses either A3 or Rackspace storage and allows one to store opaque encrypted blobs of data that can't be unencrypted without the private key that the owner maintains.  Jungle disk also gives you 5Gb of free storage and a per/Gb fee for more than that.  DropBox's 2Gb of free space and extra space can be purchased in blocks. 

Generally I will have a local working copy, a second copy on an additional hard drive, preferable a drive array that internally provides some redundancy and a cloud back-up, currently with JungleDisk.

Many of us travel and carry some sort of locally attached storage device, be that a USB or Firewire drive or flash drive.  Some use network attached storage (NAS). Either way the cloud back up can be a life saver if you are on the road and your gear gets damaged in transit.  Of course the get your data out of the cloud requires a decent internet pipe, but the trade-off is better than losing everything.

Part 3 will cover maintaining hard drive health and some 'automatic' version control software that may be appropriate in some cases.