you can never be too safe

I mentioned in my last vlog update that my main external hard-drive for Pedal's footage had, out of nowhere, died, thanks to something power related. I've tried everything I could think of to bring it back to life, but with no luck - the replacement showed up in the mail today from Western Digital, which means I have to box up the old drive and spend $20 mailing it back to the factory.

Thanks to Lan's insistence in having *everything* backed up, I had a mirrored drive that used to reconnected all of the missing media in Final Cut. But the drive failure still gave me a big scare - the last few days of having no "back up" drive was nerve racking. And I don't know what I would do with myself if I lost the last six months worth of work. I'm spending tonight re-mirroring the new drive with Desmond (the old backup; now the main drive).

So I decided to take things to the next level: off site backups. I can't afford a 3rd drive at the moment to ship to a safe place in case of the worst, so I searched for online solutions and found something that I wish I had known about back in December; when I first started importing and logging footage.

It's a service called Mozy, and for home users, they offer *unlimited* backup space for a little less than $5 a month (no, they didn't pay me to write that). For me this is great - I have 2Tbs (and growing) of footage, and although it's going to take a month to backup over the internet, it's worth it for me, especially considering I'll be editing for the next year at least.

Mozy works like Time Machine, it uses Spotlight to track changes to made to files and updates those changes in the background, I barely ever know it's doing anything (and don't worry, it will warn you if it's not).


So, hopefully several weeks from now, when I'm busy editing the feature length film, I'll have the comfort of knowing I have 2 hard copies of my footage at hand - if one drive fails, I wouldn't have any downtime: I can reconnect the media to the backup and keep on editing. And more importantly, I'll have the comfort of knowing that my MacBook Pro and all of the footage is safely sitting on a server somewhere far away from my apartment. Knock on wood.

So, that's it, I just thought I'd share how I'm keeping things safe - hopefully safe enough - during post-production.