From the course: Video Data Management on Set and in the Field

The dangers of copying a bad copy

From the course: Video Data Management on Set and in the Field

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The dangers of copying a bad copy

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- What's worse than doing something wrong? How about doing it wrong twice. The danger is that if you have a bad copy of your data and you simply duplicate that bad copy, well, now you have two bad copies. Here's the deal, a lot of times when archiving your data, or performing 3-2-1 backup, you're going to get a little bit busy. And when you get busy, you're going to feel pressure. And when you feel pressure, you're going to cut corners. And when you cut corners, you may have some regrets. So, what do you need to do? Well, don't rush. Remember, nothing is more important than the data. You spent a lot more time planning that shoot, pulling all the crew people together, and executing it. I know you probably don't want to sit there managing data, but slow down, or hire somebody to be in charge of it. Make sure that when you make your backup, and you copy that data, that you copy it to another location. Don't copy it to a drive, and then copy the drive. Because if anything happened in the middle there, you simply duplicated a mistake. Rather, invoke two unique copies. Going to two separate destinations. Once you've done that, you'll be able to validate each of those copies. And, you'll be well protected against a bad copy, or media failure. This will ensure that you greatly minimize the chance of loosing data. And remember, if possible, avoid erasing the camera media in the field, or back in the studio, until you have made a third copy on a second type of storage format. I know that this is a lot of work, and I know that as you get going, and you don't have any problems for a few weeks or a couple of months, you'll be tempted to slip back into old habits. But I can tell you, within my own company, we've experienced this mistake. It was catastrophic because it led to a lot of stress, and tons of work. Restoring media, looking for files, finding a partial backup, finding corrupt files, and ultimately having to reshoot something that we didn't get paid to do. It is tremendously expensive, and often impossible to recreate a shoot. While it is extra work, and it is incredibly boring work, please make sure you take the time to make three copies, to two locations. Each of those copies being a unique instance, generated from the original camera card. And, keep one more format on some other type of storage media. Either a third backup to a different type of system like LTO, or perhaps solid state drives, or better yet the original camera media. If you can follow this like it was a religion or a way of life, you can greatly decrease your risk of data loss.

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