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Hi,

I've been offloading footage and backing up for years...and so far not had an issue apart from a time when I had a dodgy SD card that corrupted my footage.
I see adverts for Hedge and Shotput Pro and always think I should invest in them when I have a bit of spare cash. And, I very rarely have spare cash.

I see that Hedge is on sale at $99 and wondered what this community thought about whether I should get this or not?
I do worry sometime when transferring/juggling files from one drive to another... incase an issue/problem occurs but always double check the file size, etc to make sure it looks the same, before I delete anything.
Does this software offer me anything different from that?

Thanks in advance for you time and thoughts,

There is no simple answer. My team formerly used Shotput Pro and we now use Hedge -- for major projects where we have an on-site DIT to handle this.

For other projects we may just copy the data with Finder then do a "diff" comparison with Beyond Compare or other tools. The problem is if the comparison actually checks the data, it will be slow. If it checks the metadata, it will be fast but there are cases it won't find: www.scootersoftware.com/

There are other reasons to use a tool like Hedge. You ideally want (at least) two separate data copies on site, and you don't want those transported in the same equipment case or the same vehicle. Hedge can take offload the camera card, and in a single operation make two separate simultaneous copies on two or more output drives. It is checking the actual data, but performance is optimized for this.

It's best to use two different types of drives to store the two copies on. E.g, there have been several issues reported with certain batches of SanDisk Extreme Pro and Extreme Portable SSDs. They may fail unpredictably when undergoing sustained high-speed writes.

If you just started a copy and did not double-check that, you might miss it. Or if the failure was less than total, maybe only certain files would be affected. A tool like Hedge is the most reliable way to copy and verify large transfers.

I think if you use APFS or HFS+ on the portable drives, it's probably safer. Unlike ExFAT, they both use write-ahead logging and have transactional integrity for metadata changes. However I've seen some 4TB SanDisk Extreme Portable SSDs fail on both APFS and HFS+.

Thank you.

That's really helpful and very much appreciated.

MAny thanks