My 7D/5D backup workflow.

As described here my HDSLR ingesting workflow includes copying the source footage, converting it first to Cineform, then to ProRes LT. Most of the time I am filming with my 7D and my 5D simultaneously, so after a whole day of shooting I get a lot of data to store and backup:

~41 Mbit/s from the 5D + ~44 Mbit/s from the 7D + ~100 Mbit/s from Cineform + ~80 Mbit/s from ProRes LT = 265 Mbit/s or 33,125 MB/s or nearly 2 GB/min

I haven’t seen anyone blogging about his backup workflows, so here is mine: First thing to do when coming home after a shoot is copying the source footage off the CF cards to my local drives (see picture 1)

Picture 1: Downloading source footage off the CF cards.

I have the four drives on my MacPro configured as following: The drive in bay 1 is the system drive. This drive is reserved for the operating system and applications. I am using a fast VelociRaptor HD from Western Digital with 10,000 RPM and 300GB of storage for this.
Bay 2-4 are filled with generic 500GB 7200 RPM drives configured as a striped-RAID for maximum performance. I did the RAID configuration within Apple’s disk utility (see picture 2).

Picture 2: Apple's disk utility configuration of a striped RAID.

After the source footage was copied to the internal drives I start the conversion processes. First to Cineform, then to ProRes LT via MPEG Streamclip. I save all the data in separate directories inside a master directory named after the job. After conversion, editing, exporting, etc. I usually have loads of data to backup.

In the past when I was filming with HDV cameras I used to either burn the whole job directory to spanning DVDs which resulted in a massive amount of burnt DVDs, was time consuming and expensive, or I copied the job directory to external drives connected via Firewire. Due to changing models and types of external HD enclosures I was drowning in different power supplies for different drives – a disaster! Moreover I didn’t want to pay the extra money for HD enclosures (Firewire-enabled enclosures are particularly expensive) when all I needed was the bare storage space. I didn’t plan to take the drive on a voyage!

My perfect backup workflow I found works as following:
I bought a SATA connection dock from Sharkoon called SATA Quickport Duo. (see picture 3)

Picture 3: SATA Quickport Duo for bare SATA drives.

This allows me to plug-in two bare SATA drives at a time, without enclosure. The dock connects to the workstation either with USB 2.0 or with eSATA. With USB both drives share one connection, but with eSATA each drive bay has it’s own connector on the back of the dock. In addition to this, eSATA is about 7x faster than USB. Only problem is that no Mac to this time has eSATA connections built-in.

So I bought a eSATA PCI-Express card from Sonnet, in particular the Tempo SATA E2P (see picture 4).

Picture 4: eSATA PCI-Express card for my MacPro.

When connected via eSATA, the copying performance of the SATA drives is outstanding. I get around 73 MB/s per drive. (see picture 5)

Picture 5: Copy performance of a eSATA connected drive.

So what I do now is after I finished working on a job, I copy the whole job directory including all the source and converted footage onto a fresh and bare SATA drive, catalog the drive’s content with CDFinder and store them encased and labeled in a protective plastic case in a drawer. (see picture 6)

Picture 6: Filled SATA drives, stored in a drawer.

When I need to put a finished project back online, I simply grab the corresponding SATA drive out of the drawer, and plug it in the dock. Voilá back online. It’s simple, it’s cheap (bare SATA drives are getting cheaper every day) and as long as I use this technique – about two years now – I never had a drive failure (knock on wood).

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Published:
3.13.10 / 12pm
Category:
productions, tools