Where do you keep stuff that you want to actually keep?

Last year I made a post about proper file management: http://www.leechonfilms.com/file-management-25.htm — An addition to file management on your drives is file management off of your drives.

I’ve learned that off loading completed projects from your hard drive into an efficient archive system is very important, ESPECIALLY when you have limited disc space.

My Current setup:

• Internal Hard Drive - 150 GB - — - System files
• External Hard Drive - 200 GB - — - Download Files
• External Hard Drive - 250 GB - — - Personal Files
• External Hard Drive - 500 GB - — - System and Personal backup
• External Hard Drive - 750 GB - — - Project Files

750 GB may seem like a lot, but when you have a handful of small projects with uncompressed video or even a large scale project like (documentary, seminar, feature film) it fills up quicker than you would think. Currently I’m working on two large scale projects; Tufaan (documentary) and a Seminar…both projects have over 40 one hour tapes that I want to have live access to while editing. If you do the math, that’s 500+ GB per project.

If you are working on more than one large scale project at a time, make sure you have a dedicated drive for it. Heck, its useful to have a separate editing machine per project. If you can afford it, two to three editing machines per project to make the editing process faster if you have more than one person doing the editing.

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How do you archive after the project is complete?

If you are dealing with a small scale project (total size under 50GB), then compress the entire project folder using WinRAR (make sure you select the option where it chops it up into DVD size chunks) and then burn the .RAR files to multiple DVDs.

If its a medium or large scale project (50+ GB in size) compress the footage files using WinRAR seperately (works as a backup for your tape footage), and then compress the project file without the footage.

Where do you keep all these DVDs of archived footage?

buy yourself a few of these binders to keep the archived stuff easily accessible when needed.

That’s a LOT of DVDs! I don’t want to have to store that much stuff for a single project.

The other option I can think of is you invest in a Blu-Ray (50 GB discs) or HD-DVD drive (25GB discs), but each disc comes for $20-$25 each. Not to mention $500+ for the drive itself. Personally I think it would be worth it to invest in this if you are working with HD (high definition) video.

In the case of HD video, you will also want TB (Terabyte…1000 Gigabytes) size drives, especially since HD footage takes up a lot of space.