(Electronic music) - Welcome to the backup section, probably the most important section that you should be paying attention to. Now with shooting tethered, things change in terms of how and where your files are being backed up. The nice thing about
shooting just to a camera in its simplicity is that
a lot of cameras today have a CF card slot and an SD card slot, or even two CF card slots. So this means that you can actually choose to have all of your files backed up in two locations in your camera, which is nice.
Now that we're shooting tethered, a lot of camera systems
actually do not allow you to write to your CF card and
to your computer's hard drive at the same time, which then puts the onus on you to come up with a second location almost in realtime to put those files. Now keep in mind, if you're
shooting for a client there's absolutely no exception to, I lost the files, I didn't
have a second location, so what we want to cover today are some of the options that
you should put into place that fits your workflow for having a backup solution in place. What I'd like to cover now are some of the options that you have and also the terminology of
RAID, RAID 1, RAID 0, RAID 5, read/write speeds, and how all of this fits
into your work flow. So the first drive that I wanna start with is the drive inside of your computer.
This is probably going to be the most important thing to consider when picking a computer. Now traditionally, we've all
had the hard disk drives, either at 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM. Now the hard disk drives are becoming less and less available in newer MacBooks and newer PCs and we tend to see the industry going towards solid state drives as that is becoming more
and more affordable. So what does this mean? So the hard disk drives in your computer are actually quite a bit
slower read/write speeds, so this means if you're
shooting to a computer with, let's say, a 5400 RPM drive, the files themselves are
actually going to write onto your computer's hard drive slower, which means that you're going to be able to shoot not as quickly as you could if you were shooting
to a solid state drive.
So that is a big thing to consider and I would definitely recommend shooting to a solid state drive
as the first destination for your files in shooting tethered. One other thing to consider
with solid state drives is that they are not as big as
the hard disk drives that are available. You know, it's really easy to get a one or two terabyte hard disk
drive for pretty cheap, but on the flip side, a one terabyte solid state
drive on your computer is quite a bit expensive. Yes, it's fast.
Yes, it's ideal, but you're going to spend
quite a bit more money on that internal solid state drive if it's one terabyte. Now, if you're going to be
shooting a lot of files in a day, you wanna have a least a 512 gigabyte solid state drive to shoot to and another rule of thumb is
that you always want to have it 30 to 40% free, so that means you do
not want to go over data that fills up your hard
drive 60 to 70% full, 'cause you will see your
system start to bog down, both on a PC or a Mac. So ideally, when you're
shooting to your computer, you do want to shoot internally to your solid state drive or your hard disk drive in the computer for your files first destinations where they will live. This will give you the optimal viewing experience and
the optimal experience in terms of how quickly those
files are going to render on your computer's monitor for speed.
So once we're shooting
to our internal drive, we then want to create a
copy onto an external drive. Now, Apple's made it a lot harder to customize your computer in terms of a second hard drive, but there are options with PCs. So if you're going to get a PC, technically you can get
a PC and customize it with a second internal
drive in the computer itself if you want to really keep it simple and minimize the amount of things that are plugged into your computer. It's a lot harder to do
this with Apple today.
So, having said that, we have other solutions for
you to backup your files to either manually or with
an automated process through software, like Carbon Copy Cloner. So everything you see in front of me is actually made by a
company called G-Technology or G-DRIVE. We've been using G-DRIVE
for a number of years and we really can depend on their quality, their build, their durability, and the amount of options that we have that fit our custom workflow, both for in studio with power and out on location. Where I'd like to start now
is with our mobile solutions.
These are often referred
to as shuttles or mobiles. The first one is a one terabyte G DRIVE. This is called the ev RaW. So a drive like this is gonna be where a lot of you might want to start.
It's very affordable. There's a lot of space
on it, it's one terabyte. So as you're shooting
to your internal drive, you can use software
like Carbon Copy Cloner. There's a lot of options on the market to copy data to, and that will then copy data
from your source location, which is your computer's drive and automatically make
a mirrored copy of that onto a drive like this that is at your mobile workstation.
So then you have two copies of the data on location itself, so we you leave location, you can separate those copies. You can send one with a producer, one with the client, and have that data in two
locations at all times. So this is a really good solution. This one itself is USB 3, so the connection itself here
is going to be USB 3 only.
But the nice thing about this drive itself is that you can get a case for it that also adds the addition of Thunderbolt and a little more protection, which is what's next to it right here. So this one is the G DRIVE ev ATC. And essentially, this is a case itself that has a Thunderbolt
cable built into it. And the case itself is waterproof.
So, it's shock proof, it's waterproof. It will allow you to
take a drive like this, put it in a case like that, and let's say you're going somewhere where there might be water, or you just need that
added layer of protection, and maybe a little bit of a faster speed for read/write or
transfer with Thunderbolt. Now, it's easily detachable here. It opens up so you can easily take
it out, put it back in, and have a whole family of these live in a case just like this.
Now these drives also come
in solid state options. You are going to see quite
a bit of a price increase if you go to solid state, but if speed is something that you're worried about out on location and you need to copy your
files pretty quickly, solid state is absolutely ideal, but you are going to pay quite a bit more for solid state options. And one last thing to
note on the mobile drives is that there's no backup in them, meaning that all of
the data on that drive, if let's say that drive failed, is going to be lost. So there's not backup built into this.
Now from there we can go to another option that is very similar to this in terms of there's no
backup built into it, and this is a four terabyte G DRIVE. With options for both Thunderbolt
and USB 3 on the back, but with a drive like this you have to have access to power. Now, what's the difference
between this one and this one? Obviously, power is
going to slow you down. But, with a drive like this, you're going to actually have
faster read/write speeds, so if copying data to another location is something you need to do quickly, a drive like this is going to
be a faster read/write option for transfer speeds.
Still very affordable, and you can get sizes quite a bit bigger than the one terabyte
or two terabyte options on the smaller shuttles. So from here, we're gonna go into a drive that has additional options
both for backup or speed. And that is commonly referred to as RAID. RAID itself is an acronym for a redundant array of independent disks, which means that anytime
your see the word RAID, the enclosure itself is gonna have at least two or more drives.
In this situation, we have
a 16 terabyte drive itself and it has options for RAID 0 or RAID 1. Now, we have this formatted as RAID 0, so that means we have 16
total terabytes available to write to and to read from to store all your data on. And it actually is separating your data in writing both of your data
on two disks at the same time, which is kind of scary
when you think about it. All your photos, your videos are both being written to
disk A and B at the same time.
So what this means though is that there is zero
backup built into this drive at RAID 0: so RAID 0, zero backup. But you're gonna have a much
bigger increase in speed because it uses two drives
and it's able to write to both of those drives at the same time and not get bogged down with
just writing to one drive. So from RAID 0, we're gonna
go to a RAID 1 example. Now we use this drive as RAID 1, and this drive itself has two drives.
It's a little bit smaller than this one. It's a total drive of eight terabytes. So both of these are then
four terabyte drives. Since we have it formatted to RAID 1, we actually only get 50%
of the total capacity, which means that this eight terabyte drive will only show up as
a four terabyte drive.
But, there's an added layer of security built into this drive at RAID 1. It's actually going to copy
all of your data onto drive A, and then make a copy of
that data onto drive B. So, let's say we're traveling
and a PA drops the drive or something happens and
one of the drives fails. Well, we have all of the
other data on drive B.
So there's an added layer
of security built into this. The only downside is, let's say somebody steals your drive. Well, then it didn't matter
if you had it backed up because you have all of
your data in one location. So, there's definitively
some benefits to RAID 0, there's also some benefits to RAID 1.
So again, with RAID 0
we have no redundancy, but we are blazing fast with speed. It's the fastest speeds that
we can get out of the drive. With RAID 1, we have redundancy built in, but it's actually going
to take a bid nosedive in terms of our speed. So it's going to take a lot longer for you to write your
data from your computer to a drive like this.
So from here, there
are a few other options in terms of how you duplicate your data if making copies is something that is really critical to your workflow. That's where the G-DOCK comes in. This is more of a manual
backup that you can make on multiple smaller shuttle drives. So let's say you're shooting a lot of data onto smaller drives, such as these.
These can be put in here and you can have multiple drives in the G-DOCK, and it will actually
create copies for you. So if you need to create a
lot of copies for clients, or just you wanna have a lot of copies in multiple locations for peace of mind if a job is mission critically important, the G-DOCK itself is a great solution. The only caveat to this is that you are going
to need access to power. So a solution like this is not going to be something you want to bring with you if you're going to be in
the middle of the woods and you need to make a copy.
You're going to need to use software through your computer to make multiple copies
onto a drive like this, if that is going to be in your workflow. So from here, we're going to jump into our much more advanced solutions that are commonly used for archiving. With these, you have the
option for both RAID 0, which is absolute speed and no redundancy. You also have the option for RAID 1, which is 50% of the capacity, but a lot of redundancy built in.
Or, you have additional options for something that we use called RAID 5. RAID 5 is actually the
best of both worlds. We have built in speed, but we don't take a huge
hit when use our redundancy. So basically with RAID 5, you need a minimum of three drives.
You're not going to find
any solutions out there that have three drives in them. You're normally going
to see RAID 5 solutions start at four drives. In this example, we have eight drives. So with RAID 5, it's basically
writing all of your data, all of your photos and all the
ones and zeros of that photo onto all the drives itself.
And what that means is, any one of these drives can fail. So if that drive fails, there is enough data on
the rest of the drives to actually put in a new drive and then it will re-build all of that data on that drive itself. So, we have the ability
for one of these drives, any of these drives can fail. But, what happens when you do a RAID 5, you are still taking a little
bit of a hit on capacity.
So in this solution, we've
turned a 64 terabyte drive into a RAID 5, and actually only 56 terabytes
are going to be available. So on our computer, it's not going to show
up as a 64 terabyte drive even though that there's
64 terabytes here. It's going to show up as 56
total terabytes available because it's using one of these drives, actually all of these
drives as the backup. An additional option if you wanna have an
added layer of security is to format something
like this as RAID 6.
RAID 6 is very similar to RAID 5. However, it's going to allow you to lose the total of two drives. So any two drives in here can fail, and there's enough data
on the rest of the drives to be able to lose two drives. And the nice thing about
this enclosure itself is that it's hot swapable, meaning that the drive can be on and let's say you get an indicator saying one or two of the drives have failed.
Well, you can take those out just by pushing this button. Those drives will pop out and you can then literally
put in two new drives and there's going to be enough data inside of this enclosure on
the rest of the working drives for it to then re-build and send that data to the other drives itself. It's absolutely magic, and it absolutely is a life saver if backing up your data and having you data safe
is mission critical. From here we have our newest drive that we're using out on location, and that is the Shuttle XL.
It has a lot of the same features, like RAID 5, RAID 0, RAID 1, as this one. It has huge capacity. The one thing you'll notice down here on the bottom is the ability to actually plug in drives from our Atomos recorders. And that will allow you to then backup and put your drives directly into here to dump that data on.
So that's just another feature on top of a much more rugged build that allows you to be much more mobile. But essentially, it's going
to be the same features. You're probably not going to use this in a shooting tethered scenario since you're shooting to your computer and then backing up to a drive. It's just another feature
if you're doing a shoot that has both motion and
photography built into it, this could be a good solution for you in that situation.
So that is essentially an
overview into how different drives and the features of those drives can fit into your workflow. Now I will say that there are a lot of manufacturers out there and there are always super,
super cheap options on Amazon. One thing to consider though is that you usually get what you pay for, both with the drives, the connections of
those drives themselves, the cables they come with. You don't want to be messing around and going cheap on your data storage 'cause you do not want that
to bite you in the ass.
Now, one thing also to always keep in mind is that even though that
these are high-quality drives, we always view these as, they're going to fail today. So, this is going to fail today. What is my backup solution? Do we have this in another location? Do we have it in two locations? Do we have it in two separate locations and on the cloud? So, despite these being
incredibly well built, despite a lot of these
being enterprise drives, they are always going to fail. It's similar to the tires on your car.
It's not a matter of if
you're going to get a flat, it's when you're going to get a flat, so you better have a spare tire in the back of your car. (Electronic music).
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