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Re: embarrassing goof--but good learning experience

Subject: Re: embarrassing goof--but good learning experience
From: "Richard L. Hess" richardlhess
Date: Mon Apr 13, 2009 1:24 pm ((PDT))
At 01:15 PM 2009-04-13, Dan Dugan wrote:
>Yesterday I discovered that I had made the all-to-easy supreme goof
>of file-based recording: erasing an entire expedition!

Hi, Dan,

I have been dealing with files since 1982 when I got my first
personal computer (and still have some from my HP-75 and I believe a
working HP-75). You are correct that it takes discipline.

LOCKSS - Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe -- a Stanford project -- is
also a good mantra for your work. Once again, in the second edition
of IASA TC-04 that came out a few months ago, they are warning
against using optical media.

Fortunately, I have been dealing with original media files since 2003
and have developed protocols with digital cameras that feel
comfortable with digital audio.

In my SD722, I have recently installed a 32 GB CF card and while the
system now is, for all intents and purposes RAID-1, if I were buying
today I think I'd consider the SD702 rather than the 722 as the hard
drive is no longer buying me much and while I've heard horror stories
with CF cards, my six-year experience shooting over 10,000 images has
shown no problems, and I have not had a problem with the CF cards in
the SD722 for the last year and a half, but if you have an SD702, I
would definitely have one or two spare CF cards.

With that said, what I do is extract the CF card(s) from the
device(s) I've had out in the field as soon as I get them home and
copy them to their proper home.

My basic storage system consists of two NASes. One for in-process
client audio (4x500 GB drives in a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+) and one for
everything else which includes photographs, community and family
audio projects, and general data (4x1 TB drives in a Thecus N5200
Pro). Both are running RAID 5 and are set up to email me any
anomalies. Not satisfied with that, I have a duplicate pair of NASes
in my neighbour's home, connected via a buried fibre optic link. He
has a 250 GB NAS here for his backup (RAID 0).

For audio, I generally copy the files to my audio workstation and
when I shut down that workstation, those files are pushed out to both NASes=
.

For photos, I generally copy the files to the local NAS and those
files are then cloned to the off-site NAS every night.

For JPEG photos and WAV files, I only copy the files to the off-site
NAS when they don't exist there, but not if they are modified. In
that way, I protect myself from editing errors which over-write an
original file and all I've lost are edits, not raw material should
the local NAS totally fail. All other files (and I shoot the majority
of my images in RAW NEF files) get backed up whenever they change.

Samplitude does version backups of the VIP files and I try and do
(and have my family do) versioned file saves after an interim submission, e=
tc.

But the key thing after building the infrastructure so it is useable
and mostly automatic, is to just use it the way you intended and this
will rarely happen. I find mounting the SD722 as a drive is much more
time consuming than pulling the CF card out of the unpowered machine
and stuffing it in the card reader.

As an aside, now that we're recording all of our church services, I
am doing the same basic thing with that. We have two 8 GB SDHC cards
for the Zoom H2 at the church and I shuffle them once a week. I see
what's been recorded on the card and build date folders on the local
hard drive on the DAW and copy the files into the appropriate folders
in a certain part of the hierarchy. I then produce the sermon MP3s
from that in Samplitude. I have committed to storing a year's worth
of services (44.1/24 stereo) which will be about 250 GB and then I've
suggested that the archivist better think of a way to save them or
they'll be deleted.

The archivist happens to be my brother-in-law and he's thinking
snapshots of services, certainly not all.

If I sound vague about what might be on the SDHC cards, I really
don't know because we might have a funeral or a wedding that no one
told me about, but any service which is run out of our sound booth,
all the operators have instructions to record everything. It's a lot
easier to say we have it than to apologize that it wasn't recorded.

So this is my routine and I'm sticking by it. I've been using
ViceVersa Pro for about six or seven years and don't plan to change
any time soon. www.tgrmn.com

Oh, and I also don't rent my equipment out...

Cheers,

Richard


Richard L. Hess                   
Aurora, Ontario, Canada       http://www.richardhess.com/
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm =








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