Long-Term Archiving of the Finished Project and Media

After you create your final master and other necessary deliverables, the last step is to archive your program. When preparing to archive your program, you need to gather every Final Cut Pro, Motion, Color, and DVD Studio Pro project file and every source media file, font, still-image file, QuickTime clip, and final rendered output file. In short, make sure that you archive everything that would be necessary to re-create your project five years in the future, should the need arise.

• If you’ve been using Final Cut Server: Chances are that your project files and media are already organized and ready to be archived. In this case, mount the volume you want to archive your program’s assets to, and then use the Archive To command to write all files to the archive device. When you later need to retrieve your assets, you can use the Restore command. For more information, see the Final Cut Server documentation.
• If you’re not using Final Cut Server: In this case, you need to gather all of your program’s assets manually. It’s usually best to move everything to a particular set of volumes in preparation for archiving, but the most efficient way to do this depends on the amount of hard disk space you have and how your media is organized.

When deciding how to archive your program and its media, you have two choices.

• Archiving to hard disks: Copying all of your program’s assets to a hard disk can be a fast and economical solution and is an excellent way to back up your assets in the short term. A particular advantage to hard disk backups is the ease with which you can retrieve assets.

  However, hard disk backups may not always be the best long-term solution. The data on hard disks stored for a year or more without being started up can begin to become unreliable. Periodically starting up each archive disk and reading all of the data on the disk can prevent this problem, but this approach requires diligence. Also, disks are physical mechanisms, and there’s always the chance of mechanical failure. Using a pair of mirrored hard disks for your backups provides additional insurance against losing valuable data to disk failure.

  If you need to archive your project for longer periods of time, there’s another choice.

• Archiving to tape: Many facilities archive their project assets to Linear Tape-Open (LTO) tape. LTO drives store data on tape cartridges that, when properly stored, are considered to have a lifetime of 15 to 30 years. It’s common practice to create two tapes for an additional level of safety, and the result is an extremely reliable long-term backup solution.

  There have been several generations of LTO tape technology available from several manufacturers. The current standard is LTO-4, with a maximum uncompressed capacity of 800 GB per tape. In Mac OS X, LTO tape drives can be written to using third-party utilities, and they’re also compatible with Final Cut Server.

  Tip: However you decide to back up your media, for the greatest level of safety, it’s ideal to have two sets of backups, including one that’s stored offsite in a secure location in case of fire, theft, or natural disaster.