Whats the Best Backup Strategy

We had a great backup strategy in FCP 10.0.x utilising offsite backups of each SD card via Camera Archives and Carbon Copy Cloner. We then backup up our Final Cut Projects and Final Cut Events folders - but excluded the 'Transcoded Media' folder as that was the biggy and we could re transcode media if things turned pear shaped. We also excluded the 'Render Files' and 'Analysis Files' for the same reason - quick to rebuild. We run 2 edit suites with 8TB Promise R4 drives and and even with these at 75% full of all our media we could at the end of the day (or during the day) create a backup via Carbon Copy Cloner with the above exceptions very fast to an external Thunderbolt drive to take offsite each day - easy and fast! I'm talking a couple of minutes tops to achieve a very complete offsite backup that if needed can work with the offsite backup of our camera archives and we could 'rebuild' any edit within a few hours - we've tested it and provides great peace of mind... But now what with this packaged / bundle library structure. Is something like this still possible anyone?

I don't think CCC will recognize the "Transcoded Media" or "Render Files" folders inside the Library container, but try this first to see if it does.

If it does your problem is solved. If it doesn't you could use incremental backups with CCC, or you could manually delete the contents of these folders inside te Library package before archiving. It's best not to mess with the Library package contents if you don't really need to, so test this with a small test Library before you do any serious archiving this way.

- Ronny

Just a quick idea for you to consider.

Inside FCPX 10.1 - create a backup library on the offsite thunderbolt hard drive.

Copy all events in the primary library to the backup library when the workday is over.

FCPX 10.1 will ask you if you want to copy optimized media or proxy media. And it will never copy render files.

You could store all original media as External Media. Then have CCC backup only the Library backup files and the original media. Since all Library auto backups are in one folder, that would be easy.

There is a new product on the market (or almost on the market) which might be very useful for backup in an FCP environment: www.mlogic.com/products/mtape . This a thunderbolt LTO-6 tape drive which connects directly to a thunderbolt port and provides 6.25TB of storage per tape (compressed). If you combine this with a RAID array with enough capacity to hold all your media, and work only with copies of your media on external drives, you can create a very effective backup strategy which is (in my opinion) much safer than using disks alone.

The bulk of FCP backups is (or should be) original media, with FCP files being quite small. However, due to changes in Pro X related particularly to sub clips, you may find you are doing a lot of destructive editing of your media and this may increase the size of your FCP backups. In this case, you need another RAID array or at least another large external drive where you can dump copies of your library at regular intervals (if you are working with managed media copied into your libraries).

A tape-backup strategy (tried and true) is to run a regular complete backup every week with incremental backups every day or even at set intervals during the day. Completed projects can be archived to tape and the files removed from disk. Most backup software manages this for you - and it is relatively easy to retrieve to a "point in time" though you may be asked to swap tapes.

Managing your tapes is important. In the IT world in which I spent most of my life, we used to do a monthly backup of everything and then send this tape off-site, permanently. We would run a weekly backup of everything on a sequence of 5 tapes (Weeks 1-5), and then rotate the daily tapes (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu) which would contain incremental backups only. To restore something like a library you loaded the weekly tape, and then the required daily tapes. In the FCP world the data longevity is shorter, and rapid retrieval is required, so a mix of tape and disk is more sensible. I am thinking I will do something like this:


Media Master

---

RAID array with striping rather than redundancy, online always, with all current media for all current projects.


Working Media

---

External drive, thunderbolt, perhaps SSD, with working copies of managed media in libraries.


Online Backup

---

External drive or striped array with sufficient capacity to hold a copy of the current project(s) and incremental copies - managed by Time Machine which provides an hourly backup of the FCP working files and any edited media files.


Tape Backup

---

Weekly full backups on rotating tapes (Weeks 1-5) which are overwritten each week. Monthly full backups with current monthly backup retained on-site and then moved to offsite location (tapes are small so easy to take home or drop in the mail) when you create a new monthly backup tape. Daily incremental backups on the daily tapes which are rotated Mon-Thurs.

Archive

---

Full backup to archive tape, stored onsite of offsite (depends whether the loss of this data is a critical issue - for many projects it won't be once the project is completed). Project files and media then removed from local disk storage.


Retrieval

---

Time Machine will give you more or less instant access to your FCP files and media at hourly intervals up to the capacity of the Time Machine backup drive (i.e.: before it begins deleting files). If files have fallen off the time machine backup you can retrieve to a point in time at the end of each day from your monthly, weekly and daily incremental tapes.


Tape Rotation

---

You might think that rotating tapes is a nuisance, but tapes can be damaged - so it is usual practice to rotate your tapes so that if a tape gets screwed up you are not losing the last good backup. In this scenario, your daily incremental backup may screw up the daily tape, but you still have the good backup from the previous day and the information you lose on the damage tape has already been written to the last weekly tape. Ditto for the weekly tapes.


Cost
----
LTO 6 tapes are not cheap at around A$100 each. For a 12mth tape backup strategy you will need:

12 Monthly tapes
5 Weekly Tapes
4 Daily Tapes
X Archive Tapes

About 30 tapes every year - assuming you retire all the tapes after 12 mths. However you can recycle the monthly tapes as archive or weekly tapes as they will only have been written once. Ditto for the weekly tapes, which will have been written only 11-12 times. The daily tapes will have been written 50 times or so, and should be scrapped or used for archiving nonessential projects.

This is a traditional IT backup strategy - you can adapt it for your workflow, but the rationale here is maximum safe retention of critical data in a commercial environment - like orders, invoices, inventory files and anything else which is changing rapidly where corruption or accidental deletion may not be noticed immediately.