Organizing content archives, tips and tricks?
 

For those of you with exclusive (or even nonexclusive) content archives, how are you cataloguing and storing them? How many copies do you make and in how many locations?

I currently have roughly 1 TB in raw video. Then the edited version. Then assorted clips for multi-purposes. Then raw pictures. Then corrected pictures.

I like to keep things organized and my current set up is the furthest from. I have spoken with the salespeople at CatDV and it seems like an interesting option for cataloguing.

But what about storage? How many copies?

I currently keep a copy on:
Off-site server
In office NAS
Spare external hard drives

Was thinking about taking some hard drives to a safety deposit box as well?

I am slowly uploading to Amazon Glacier - i have calculated that my 30 tb will be about $300 per month - and Synology has an app for automatic sync with Glacier

costly - yes - but putting that amount of data on a dozen drives and keeping that actual will never work out

and with Glacier it's out of reach from theft, fire etc

your 1tb would be $7 per month

(edit - misread that - it's more than 1tb - just calculate yourself - it's $0.007 per GB per month)

Wish I had some wise words of wisdom - but my arrangement sounds similiar to yours at the moment. I use an older 1TB and a newer 2TB external for all my pics (both western digitals) - both raw and edited. Video isn't really a factor - I don't shoot much these days to worry about...and the stuff I do shoot is non-adult.

I've been giving more thought to off-site storage lately, tho. Cloud, dropbox...something like that.

I look at all the time, money and effort I put into backing shit up on CDs/DVDs in years past - now they're dust collectors on the shelves here in the office.

I copy photo & video content to hard drives. As the drives get full, they are stuck in my safe. Original Mini DV tapes are all in racks if needed. All photo content is also copied to my Drobo 5N so it's at my fingertips when I need it without having to pull and archive drive.

The structure is very simple and all searchable through my 2257 database.

Year/Month/Model Name

20 TB of drive space and still room to expand when needed. I really should move all the video content over as well.

you have 3 copies i dont think you need more.

its only 1tb tho and hd's are cheap so why not make more copies.

It also depends on how your content is named (filenames). Sometimes that can make for tough organizing.

But I have 3 copies of all content on external 2TB drives (NOT Western Digital tho; WD is notorious for the "click of death" and it has happened to me with those drives so now it's all Toshiba). Plus the content is on double servers (one active, one backup).

But still I'm paranoid. LOL

We had the raw tapes, still have Beta tapes na dHi 8, then the edited versions on DVD and External Hard Drives. Then a back up of the stores on External Hard Drives and a computer. Plus we used to have everything on a server.

Given the options now if still in business I would be adopting the method Madalton uses. $300 a month is well spent.

Recently had a lot of the External Hard Drives go down on me. Thankfully we still have the DVDs.

Everything thing was recorded on Excel spread sheets.

That's a good idea. S3 is an option as well.

What about cataloging? Did you create a custom system or are you using something available on the market? Not a huge deal for me right now but I like to plan ahead.

no special tool for that, i am just very anal about sorting and naming everything.

i never understood why people file their papers neatly into folder and on their computer they dump everything in one directory ;)