stupider and stupider---how to blow a hundred hours of work

We've all done it. Okay, let me rephrase that: most or some or maybe just one or two of us have done it: forgotten to back up to another drive. And we are mostly lucky when we don't do that because the one drive we have the timeline/project on happens to keep working. Except...except when it doesn't. Yesterday I lost five days work, five x 12 hour days (so my math isn't that good: sixty hours, it felt like a hundred). Two twenty-two minute projects gone. I mean, gone gone.

What is "being stupid?" We are intelligent people, I'm a smart guy, but I do dumb things from time to time. Why? Especially when it is not the first time I've had this happen? Laziness? Being tired at the end of a long day? Cockiness--"it's a new drive, it won't happen to me." A friend suggested that it would be a GOOD THING if we had an application which did the following:

at any attempt to quit FCPX, or any chosen application for that matter, it would remind you to back up, it would offer your choice of backup location, it would even suggest an incremented file name based on the name of the file being worked on, with a yyyy-mm-dd format perhaps, or just the increment. And it would do the same thing when you try to shut down or manually sleep the computer: Do you want to back up first? it would ask, and offer to do much of the work of backing up, and always offer (assuming you have it) an alternate drive to the one the main file that is open is on. You could of course specify a backup hd location in the preferences. It could be called HEY, STUPID! although that might not sell as well as "BACKSTOP."

Someone into building apps? I'll be first in line to buy it!

Sorry to hear your woes...

It already exists: TIME MACHINE. If you have large enough backup drives, you can set your media drives to back up using Apple's built-in back-up system. It's saved my tuchas on numerous occasions. With Time Machine you can always go back to an hour ago, yesterday or last week. Just make sure you have enough room. I've got an 8TB backup and it does brilliantly.

It doesn't take the place of archiving, but at least your current working projects are (usually) safe.

Best...

Time machine doesn't work for me, and here's why: the backup regime of hourly, daily, and so on means it is backing up continually--which is fine for non-video work, but I can't have it clogging up my RAM backing up while I am editing. I did use, for a while, an old preference pane no longer supported called (something like) "Time Machine Editor" which allowed the user to specify the interval between backups. I wish Apple would just make the option available to all. Anyway, I have discovered, this morning, there's a thirty day free trial to Crash Plan +, which is based in the US. The free version allows automated backups but the best deal is their plus plan which gives you unlimited cloud storage. Unlimited. For an annual fee and a small monthly fee you get peace of mind knowing the files are safely stored away from the office or home. I'm going to give it a try today.

The other reason I am not using Time Machine is that it is already backing up my documents and my wife's laptop documents, and it doesn't have enough space for all my video work.

Having an offsite storage for at least the project files/timelines, if not the media itself, is probably a good investment in security.

www.crashplan.com/consumer/crashplan-plus.html

So sorry to hear about your loss, that is a huge bummer. You might think about ProVersioner from Digital Rebellion. I haven't used it yet myself but looks interesting.

www.digitalrebellion.com/proversioner/index.html

Also, Carbon Copy Cloner, can be configured to back up only what you want, only when you want, and can be put on a schedule. All professionals should have a nightly backup automated on top of everything else.

Yeah, TimeMachine is great for the casual end user, not for professional backups.

Not that Time Machine is perfect, but there are things you can do to improve performance. I use it professionally and it has saved me on several occasions.

For our edit systems, we have a CalDigit raid card and an outboard HD Element raid. We have the 4 drive bays (not including the boot drive in the optical slot) hardware raided into a massive Time Machine volume and use the external Raid as my media drive. This always has at least 50% headroom over what is stored on the Media drives, so we don't run out of space. (At some point, it's not a bad idea to purge older projects off of Time Machine that have been archived off the system; remember Time Machine is back up for CURRENT work, not an archive system, so get rid of stuff you're not needing for current work!)

That way, if the system goes down, I can move the media drives to another machine with another CalDigit card. Because it's going to a fast RAID (400-500 mb), it doesn't get bogged down backing up. Also, once all of the media has been backed up, the system is only making incremental backups of project files, which take moments. I have never noticed it to slow down my editing.

If you are in a particularly intensive edit session with no patience for any kind of slow-down, you can always temporarily disable Time Machine and put it back on when you take a coffee break. (Use a PostIt to remind yourself!)


The key is to have a large enough/fast enough storage volume (at least 50% larger than your media drives) that won't bog your system down.

I'm really skeptical about cloud based solutions which can't really back up your media effectively. (Think about TBs of data being chugged out over the Internet but because this seems to work for me, i have really investigated it. I suppose some form of off-site would be a good idea, however.)

I am curious about Pro Versioner, so I'll check that out...