Archiving Data

by Walter Biscardi

In this digital media world, it’s imperative to not only have enough media array space to do your work, but also to store and protect that media for the long term. We’ve been using a very simple method going on four years now and in response to a question I actually got today, here’s how it works.

We store everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, on bare hard drives. Yes, I know what you’re saying. “Walt, hard drives die!” Yes, they absolutely 100% do. That’s why everything is stored on both a Master and Clone with the clones stored off-site. When either the Master or Clone dies, we purchase a new drive and make a brand new Clone.

Organization: First off, every drive gets assigned a 7 digit number by our Media Management Specialist such as 0002372. Why 7 digits? So we can store up to 9,999,999 items before we run out of numbers. This applies to ALL media that’s stored in our library including Tape, DVD, Blu-Ray, CD, Hard Drives and anything else that goes into the library. It’s all managed through a VERY simple Filemaker Pro database we started about 6 years ago and it still works quite well. We tried using CatDV for a while, but it was just too confusing and cumbersome so we switched back to Filemaker and have kept running it since. Kelly can pretty much find anything in the shop within 5 minutes so it’s still working well for us. Moving forward, the next thing we will test out is Axle as soon as we get our new series rolling which will be reality series style so it will involve a LOT of media per episode.

Storage Unit: We’ve been running “Tray Less” drives from WeibeTech for all four years we’ve been doing this system. That company was purchased by CRU-Dataport a few years ago, but the units still remain. You can get 1, 2, 4 and 8 bay units. Here’s a picture of the RTX410-3QJ which is essentially the latest version of the 4 bay models we run in the shop and we also run a couple of the single drive units. This is a JBOD unit with four individual connections for the four drive trays running standard SATA drives. What this means is that all four drives will show up as individual units instead of the entire box showing up as a “RAID.” So we can copy data to two Masters and two Clones simultaneously if we want. And you don’t have to use all four slots to use the unit. 1, 2, 3 or all slots can be used at any given time. read more...