Ever since we began shooting to Hard Drives in mid 2009, the issue of how to store or archive our footage has been a constant. Since this is mostly a ‘technical issue’, I got the job of ‘Archivist’ by default.
So far, I’ve been storing the footage on 1.5 TB RAID drives that have been a part of our post production systems for several years now. I’m not exactly sure how old they are at this point, which has been an additional concern, because no one really knows the ‘shelf life’ on hard drives, and there’s too many variables (like storage conditions) to consider.
So we bought these brand new shiny solid state drives (no moving parts – think of them as a big memory stick) which is reported to be the best way to archive these days. No moving parts means less wear and tear on the drives – and thus we can assume longer shelf life.
Well, as our luck would have it, 2 of our RAID drives failed to boot up when we began the archiving. Close to 3 TB of footage (about 20 or so films worth) is locked on these little boxes.
The worst case scenario is that I have to use some kind of Forensic Data Retrieval company, which while they are expensive, the data won’t be lost forever. I’m hoping I can use a couple of tricks to get them up at least one more time so I can copy the drive.
So far, it’s working. I was able to get one of the two RAID’s running and it’s being copied right now. It gives me hope that I’ll get the other one going.
Now I have about 9 hours of data transfer and I’ll be able to box up this old RAID and store it for good knowing that I have a usable back up for at least the next few years.
- Mark
’Senior Archivist’
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