Back up data issues.

This is a tale for those in post-production. A kind of "Nightmare On Backup Disc's". 

There is just one scene in my latest doc that I could not recreate. Other's would be very difficult but I could get around them. It was the UK's June 8th Election Day and then the post-mortem that followed first thing the next morning.

This is what happens on any shoot - I put the rushes on my laptop, then transfer them to a portable drive and then to a larger drive. If Don McVey is shooting (he was not on this shoot) he also transfers the rushes to a drive I bought him. I then take everything to Jon Walker who backs up everything three times. 

Thus I have everything backed either five or six times. 

Jon had put all the rushes online because Emlyn Price and I have spent much time paper editing them. These were of course not the master 4K rushes and could not be used in the final film. Included in them were the election day ones. 

However, Jon's copy of those particular rushes corrupted, and they were the only rushes he had not backed up multiple times. Not to worry as I had it back up numerous times. 

It turned out I had all the rushes on the portable hard drive EXCEPT the election day ones. They were on there as that's how I transport them to Jon's. They have disappeared. How ?

Shit. 

My worry was because we had filmed all through election night, I was so tired that maybe I had transferred the rushes from my laptop straight onto Jon's computer. I had long ago wiped those rushes from my computer so as I Ubered back to see if I had them I was extremely apprehensive as I was worried that in my tiredness I forgot to back them up. 

Luckily I did have them all on my other larger hard drive. 

I mention all of this because I have worked with filmmakers who only have two backups of their rushes. One recently argued with me with some authority that two was enough because the probability of two hard drives messing up was a million to one......or something. 

So the moral of this tale is backup, backup, backup and once more backup.

As a resulted of this post on my Facebook page There is an interesting Coda from sound man Phil Antigua -  

At the end of the day myself as an Audio Engineer and you as a Filmmaker, we record and back up our data effectively onto rust-coated, plastic, spinning discs. Well... SSD’s are technically clustered arrays of transistors but where it all ends up on are always rusty discs! Digital archiving is in crisis. There is still no secure way of backing up any project today and even storing 4K RAW files in twenty different locations (virtual or otherwise) becomes increasingly insane as we move to 6K, 8K RAW images & beyond... Technicians & engineers must provide us with a physical archive format that doesn’t depend upon the magnetic charge of rusty metal stuck onto a spinning disc or tape. Seems archaic when you say it like that!