Our Video Backup & Recovery Strategy

In a digital world, some of our most precious assets are those we cannot touch. And those assets must be protected from a number of unique threats, including your usual Wrath of God concerns like fire and flooding, but also digital threats like hackers, file corruption, server failure, or power outages. Our backup and recovery strategy wasn’t always iron-clad. There was a time when we experienced the pain of lost files, an experience we are in no rush to repeat.

Storytime:  Bytes of Despair: The Hard Drive Calamity of 2015

The year was 2015. Unnamed Films was in its infancy, and our fearless leaders, Scott & David, were in the middle of a short film project. They had already written a script, hired a few actors, and filmed everything on their beat sheet. Once they were finished, they offloaded their precious footage from the camera to a hard drive, deleting it from the SD card. When they were ready to move on to editing, they made a horrific discovery: the hard drive had corrupted. Devastated, they did some cursory research and sent their hard drive out for recovery by a less-than reputable (but affordable) recovery service. When the drive came home, the service had done more damage than good. The fellas sprung for a second attempt, but the second recovery agent couldn’t undo the damage of the first. In the end, it became the lost project of 2015. And our fearless leaders learned a powerful lesson: always store data in at least two safe locations.

We share this tragedy with you in hopes that you learn two things from our mistakes. First, always read Google reviews before shipping a drive off to the cheapest available recovery agent. And second, never trust a hard drive alone; always spring for two safe locations for your most precious files.

Our Process: Data in Two Places at All Times

The data we keep at Unnamed Films is fully redundant, meaning it’s stored in two separate, safe locations at all times, at minimum! If you’ve worked with us to film a wedding, marketing video, or even a musical, we followed this procedure to keep your files safe, come what may. A brief delay as we wait for power to be restored or a large download from our secure cloud backup is the worst possible scenario for our current clients.

So how do we do it? Simple, we follow the lessons we learned that fateful day in 2015: we keep all files in two places. Oh, and we read Google reviews.

Let’s say the files in question are the raw video from a recent wedding. Cameras capture the event, then file them onto our rock-solid SD cards. Within 24 hours, those SD cards are offloaded onto our file server. The offload process follows the tortoise & the hare principle: slow and steady wins the race.

Once data is offloaded, the computer rigorously checks for "fidelity," or any differences between the video files from the source SD card and the end destination, our servers. After passing the fidelity test, the data is copied to our secure cloud server as a secondary backup location. Because we truly fear the Wrath of God in the form of the elements, we have recently started keeping a third full backup of all current files in a fireproof safe.

Our file server contains a number of hard drives and data is stored redundantly so that up to three drives can fail at any time without any data being lost. Should more than three drives completely fail, we have the cloud storage as a backup option. We maintain footage in both of these locations until we receive approval on the final video edit from our client.

After final approval, we hang onto files for as long as our storage system can hold them. Sometimes we're able to hang onto raw files for up to 5 years (because Scott has a disorder that makes him physically incapable of deleting anything any more recent. He won't tell us what the name of the disorder is, but he swears it's legit). We never delete files without giving adequate (and even obnoxious) warning. And until files are deleted officially (after a series of bright red emails), they are safely stored in a minimum of two locations so we're ready if someone requests a new video, their raw files, or anything else your imagination can conjure.

The Moral of the Story

This may seem like an odd blog post for us to create, but as the world becomes increasingly digital, we just want to share what we’ve learned with all of our friends. And anyone else who will listen! We lost a project in 2015 and we don’t want anything like that to happen to you! If you, like us, fear the Wrath of God and the loss of prized data, do as we do: keep it in twos! Whether you’re a business owner sitting on a dragon-sized hoard of sensitive data that you need to keep in order to make a living, or a smartphone user whose sensitive info would be lost with one accidental drop of your phone—make sure to keep your data in doubles.

PS: If this is your first time hearing that UNF stores old data, shoot us an email and ask what you can do with your old project files! We don’t keep our data for nothin’!