I’ve written in Kibbles before about all kinds of different data storage mechanisms. Maybe it seems like I’m a little bit obsessed with it, but I like to keep my data around. We always talk up backups here in Kibbles and I sometimes wonder what people are backing up. Photos? Work documents? Financial stuff? Personally I do a lot of creative work on my computer. This is stuff that’s absolutely irreplaceable. I’m willing to bet the most common creative thing people have on their computers is photos. Surprisingly, I don’t have that many photos, but I do a lot of writing on my computer and I’d be devastated if I lost it. I also shoot a lot of video, compose music and have the occasional software project lying around.
The thing about creative pursuits like these is that there tends to be a lot of stuff and only a little bit of it ever makes it into the final project. For every ten musical compositions I start working on, maybe only one or two will get fully flushed out into a finished product. Video is even worse. I’ve worked on video projects forever, and one thing I’ve learned is that cutting and editing footage is easy. Reshooting footage is difficult or impossible. Writing follows a similar pattern.
What all this means is that I tend to have a lot of raw data (video, music, text, etc) that I have to deal with. When I’m actively working on something, it’s not too big of a deal. I have a good 2TB external drive, and a 1TB hosted RAID. Once I’m done with a project however, what should I do with all this data? It feels very wrong to me to delete footage I shot, especially if I used it in a project. What if I want to recut it later? What it something comes up and I decide I want to use some footage that missed the final cut in some project?
Back in the days when I worked at a public access TV station, we had two massive shelves absolutely filled with VHS tapes. Most of it was raw footage that was available to be reused, recut or just rebroadcast. The principle was the same though; we were holding on to all that footage. If you can afford it, hard drives are great for storing lots of footage or creative projects. They also have the advantage of being rewritable. For me though, I tend to prefer burning things off to DVDs, especially when it comes to raw footage. They’re cheaper and will potentially last a lot longer than a hard drive (good quality discs anyway).
It’s sad that Apple has all but given up on disc drives at this point, but you’re not completely out of luck. They make a very slick USB-powered SuperDrive that you can plug into any computer and burn discs or read them. I use Taiyo-Yuden DVDs any time I’m saving important data.