Backup Redundancy Redundancy

Chase Jarvis and his crew share some insights about their workflow from camera to final product - always with data redundancy in mind. Here is what it boils down to:

• During shoots outside the studio they regularly swap out the SD cards of their cameras
• They have a laptop hooked up to multiple external backup SSDs (“field drives”) and immediately copy their footage to that computer
• For longer assignments they bring an editing station with them. After every day of shooting they again copy the data from their field drives to the editing station (again a redundant multi drive setup) and start editing in their hotelroom.
• The station drive is a RAID1 setup and during the night they each take one of the drives to their rooms to prevent data loss in case of theft, fires, etc.
• Editing: The photos are still fresh in their minds, the filter and pre-edit them. They label them so they can work on them more intensively once they get back to the studio.
• Back in the studio they copy the data from the mobile editing station to their server in the studio. The server is 2 times 32TB of hardrives tied together in a RAID. They also have an offsite server that mirrors the data. They organize all of their data by year/project/day/camera/shot. They also put that information into the filename.
• Pictures and videos they work are no longer considered raw data and get copied into the “live work” section of the server. Raw originals never get edited and are considered immutable. The output of “live work” gets shared with the client. They use Aperture, Photoshop, etc. for images. For videos they use Final Cut Pro.
• “Live data” also gets backed up off-site. They rotate several plug-and-play drives and put TimeMachine backups on them.
• They work with copies of the data on their editing stations and those stations are also backed up with TimeMachine.

To reiterate:

• Always have multiple copies of your data
• Keep an extra copy of your data off site