The Importance of Media Archiving

Media archiving and backup are vital. I was mid-way through a school project. I’d spent hours tweaking and finessing. My media was on a USB drive, and I was editing in Media Composer in HD. The computer crashed. I took it to the Apple Store. They had to wipe the hard drive to get it back up and running. We were able to transfer some of the data to a CD, but that was it. That incident taught me the importance of data protection. I bought two external hard drives and started running Time Machine like crazy.

In 2012, my wife and I moved to Los Angeles. In the first month or two, I took a tour of Fotokem. They showed me their NextLab DIT solution. That was the first time I’d heard the term “checksum”. It didn’t take long before ShotPut Pro became a part of my media copy process. I bought a new hard drive to protect my older data.

Now, I don’t offload anything without a checksum. RAID protection has become standard for me. LTO backups entered my life. My college projects no longer disappear into the ether.

Light Iron and Media Archives

Around the same time, I started going to Light Iron’s OutPost University. It was my first experience with Light Iron. I was hooked. How could a company be so forward thinking? Michael Cioni is definitely one of my heroes. Just don’t tell him I said so.

Light Iron has an amazing data pipeline. The number of assets they handle daily is insane. And somehow, they have to keep it all safe. One of the services they provide is data archive.

Keenan J. Mock is their Senior Media Archivist in Hollywood, CA. At NAB, he gave a great presentation on media archiving practices. He proclaimed the importance of a good hero checksum. With that checksum, data integrity can be verified every time data is copied. This ensures that the files on an LTO tape are exactly the same as those that were on the camera card.

For more presentations from the Faster, Together Stage visit fastertogether.com