After recording uncompressed footage, videographers may end up working with numerous custom files, encoded in various codecs and containers via their editing software. As such, it is important for them to make regular, comprehensive backups that preserve the originals, as well as the different versions for possible usage later on. Data archiving solutions like DIGISTOR REWIND can also safely write large files to Blu-ray, meaning that users will have a stable, local archive of their video libraries that is accessible without having to log in to a cloud-based interface.

Photographer and blogger Chase Jarvis recently highlighted the importance of photographers and videographers making redundant, separately stored backups of all images, including a clean copy of their originals. He recommended hard drives, but for these purposes, media professionals may instead turn to a more reliable medium like a DIGISTOR External SSD that is portable, durable and high-capacity. With USB 3.0 compatibility and no required drivers or power adapters, these SSD drives have up to 512 GB of flash storage and run conveniently on the power from the USB bus.

“In order for your backup protocol to be effective, it is absolutely crucial that your files be in at least two different locations as soon after creating the images as possible,” advised Jarvis. “Creating two copies of the original data is the most important step in backing up data. However unlikely, hard drives and memory cards do sometimes fail.”

However, in addition to writing data more rapidly than an HDD, DIGISTOR SSDs run with no moving read/write heads, lessening the prospect of costly mechanical failure.

How much data does video create?
Going forward, having access to scalable and dependable storage will only become more important. In an article for the Data Center Journal, contributor Alex Rabbetts shed light on how video in particular creates a tremendous amount of data: Even an hour of video footage can take up tens of gigabytes in storage.

“[Video] will generate huge quantities of data that need to be stored,” wrote Rabbetts. “The days of storing (or losing) hundreds of rolls of film have long gone and have been replaced by data.”

Rabbetts highlighted the challenges that video and television professionals face in keeping video and other information safely archived yet readily accessible. Magnetic tape, HDDs and cloud-based solutions have often been used to address this issue, but they all have key drawbacks, such as low durability or possibility of outage, which prevent them from being as stable as Blu-ray alternatives.

DIGISTOR offers Blu-ray recordable media with up to 100 GB on each disc and a long shelf life. With REWIND, archiving is a matter of dragging and dropping files from a computer to the mounted Blu-ray burner. For enterprise data centers, rising storage requirements for video and other files can be addressed by the DIGISTOR Enterprise Archive that features a Blu-ray rack that can safely hold terabytes of data for years, without the high energy usage or costs of an HDD array.