[Frameworks] Archive strategies for filmmakers

[Nathaniel Draper]

Dear Frameworks-

I’ve been wondering about the best data backup and “archive” strategies for individual filmmakers and artists, and I was hoping to find out the kind of tools, solutions, workflows etc. that are used by people on this list. (Excuse me if this topic has already come up.) This mostly comes from my own push to move beyond from the trusty old pile-of-miscellaneous-spinning-hard-drives method, but I also figure it could be useful information to share around, given the amount of heavy digital media we’re all now wrangling.

I’m aware of some of the practices recommended for long-term storage by moving image archives, but these solutions are often pretty complicated or expensive for a single person to undertake. LTO tapes are stable and large, but the tape decks are prohibitively expensive and they have to be migrated periodically. Amazon Glacier or similar long-term cloud storage takes some know-how to set up as a data archive.

How have people approached this? How many copies do you keep of your work, and on what media? Are backups generally duplicate hard drives, or do RAID setups, cloud storage, tape drives, bluray discs or other options figure into it? Do you have a uniform strategy for storing your work, or are backups normally just mirror copies of your working drives, whether on redundant hard disks or on services like Dropbox or Backblaze?

And then, what formats do you store your work in? Does it just depend on what you have, like a ProRes, MP4 or DCP? Does anyone take a more systematic approach, transcoding files to a common or future-minded format like DPX or FFV1 before storing it for good? And do you have a specific workflow — using bags, checksums or other data verification tools — or is it a per-case basis?

Lots of questions - enough to make my head spin. Of course it’s hard for an individual to act like a full-blown media archive, but I get the impression that having some sort of uniform strategy is a good idea, since files don’t keep like film prints. Archives devote a lot of attention to making sure that digital files won’t get lost, and that they’ll be in a readable format or codec into the near future, but I suppose the question holds for individuals as well. I’m curious if there’s a best strategy for filmmakers that balances long-term reliability with ease of use (not needing the command line, for instance).

I look forward to any responses or recommendations!

Thanks-

Nathaniel Draper