Tag: media management

How tape can ease your workflow…

How do you mark all the media you get during a shoot? SD cards from the mixer, SxS cards or XQD cards or P2 cards. I use a really simple method based on different colored neon gaff tape. Neon Pink (or yellow) and Neon Green. When you remove a card from the camera PinkTape it and mark “CamA_1_date”. After offload and confirmation Green tape it! It’s that simple to keep track of what’s what. The green is really just an extra layer to remove any doubt that the card is clear to format.
You can also save all your “Pinks” to log your offloads over days of shooting. This together with the log from ShotPut Pro puts my mind at ease that everything is ok.

To make this easier you can put small “pinks” on the side of the camera so ways accessible right after eject!

Remember to put all media on at least 2 different location BEFORE formatting your card. A Raid is NOT a backup. Happy Copying!

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Hard Drive Failure – Backup?!

This morning an awful sound came from the closet that houses my server at home. It sounded like someone had stuck a fork in a blender… Funny enough, just yesterday, I made a comment about how my hard drives spin, day in and day out. EYEtv is running 24 hours a day recording tv to the disks. Well the computer must have heard me… cause it showed me a big red text that read “stripe slice failed” 🙂

I’ve been lucky through the the years and despite failed drives I’ve lost very little data. I know of people who’ve lost enough data to make a grown man cry. Because as you know, it’s not if but rather when the next hard drive will fail. I don’t think it’s an option, it is a requirement to have a good backup system setup, both at home and at the office. How would you deal if you lost all pictures of your kids/friends and family becuase they were on that drive with no backup. Not to mention work related files.

I have an elaborate backup system setup, involving both redundant drives on-site as well as an off-site backup in case of fire/theft/flooding…but I am a nerd. 😉

Nowadays there are many great options for automatic backup solutions. External hard drives thats sense a new file and automatically makes a copy  or Cloud solutions costing next to nothing that synchronize your data as soon as something new is added. I am just surprised how few people use them… How do you backup all your data?