Hey there interwebs! Eric Kmetz here to talk about drive management and how to keep your sanity in doing so.

As video professionals, it’s pretty safe to assume that we don’t store all of our footage, audio, DVD menus, render files, exports, etc, etc all on ONE hard drive. There are two reasons we don’t want to do this. The first is that I’m not sure they make a hard drive large enough to hold all of that data, and the second is you just would not want to put your entire business in the hands of a single hard drive. So, here we are with a ton of hard drives and no idea how to keep track and organize them. What I’m going to do is give you a few quick tips on making your drives more organized and structured.

The first and most important you will want to do is develop a system. Different people will have different methods for organizing their files; however it really comes down to personal preference and what will make you most efficient.

One way to organize is to store certain types of files on specific drives. So you have a set drive for your render files, a drive for exports, etc. Another approach is to organize based on projects, so you keep all files pertaining to a certain project on the same drive. Personally, I like to incorporate a mixture of the two. As much as possible, I will keep files for a project on one specific drive. This makes things easy when switching between open projects because I only have to connect one drive.

There is an exception to this rule. Since we have made the switch to shooting entirely on DSLR’s, we no longer have the luxury of having mini-DV tapes as a backup for our footage. Because these files cannot be recreated like DVD menus and FCP files, all raw footage is treated differently then other files. When copying over files from CF cards, I will put them on drives that are specifically for captured footage. These drives are then backed up onto a second drive and those backups are stored in a fireproof safe. By doing this, we minimize our risk of losing any footage as much as possible.

Regardless of what method you choose when developing an organization system, the most important thing is that you stick to it! Create a manual to keep the procedures consistent throughout the company.

Now that you have a fool-proof system in place, you are going to need a way to keep track of what files are on what drive. It’s quite annoying and inefficient to search through drive after drive looking for one specific file (and then not finding it on occasion).  That’s where a disk management program comes in.

For those of you on a Mac, I strongly recommend that you check out DiskLibrary. When I started at Epic, this was the very first recommendation I made for the company. This program will allow you to catalog every hard drive or DVD that you have, so you can browse the list of files on the drive without connecting it to the computer! For more on DiskLibrary, watch the video that accompanies this post. I go into a little more detail on the program, and how it can help you.

One final piece – RAID’s. There are two main types of RAID (or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks), RAID 0 and RAID 1. A RAID 0 array is known as a striped raid. To put it simply, this takes two identical hard drives and combines them into one drive. So two 500GB drives become one 1TB drive. The data is then written onto both drives sequentially, and therefore increases the speed and performance of the drive. I would not recommend creating a striped RAID set using external hard drives because of the increased possibility of data corruption when drives are moved. A good place to incorporate this is your computers internal hard drive (if possible).

The other type of RAID is RAID 1 or mirrored RAID. A mirrored RAID takes two identical hard drives and creates one single hard drive. The data is then written identically onto both hard drives. The drive can continue to operate and data can be accessed if one of the hard drives fail. It is important to note that using a mirrored RAID can become complicated if data is written to one drive while the other is not connected, thus degrading the RAID set. In short, mirrored RAIDs are not the ideal solution for data backup.

Well, there you go kids. I hope this post has helped you sort out the best solution for managing and organizing your hard drives. As always, if you have any additional questions feel free to email me at eric[at]epicmotion.com, or reach out to me via twitter, @erickmetz.

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