With the advent of affordable solid-state flash media and high-quality HD cameras, production companies small and large are taking another look at their backup processes. Without an original video tape or film stock to go back to, disk storage and backups are more important than ever before. Now in addition to storing project files and media assets used in productions, disk storage IS the original backup media. What is your backup strategy? How are you protecting yourself and your business from the myriad number of ways a hard disk can fail?

To offer a little perspective on the subject of hard disk reliability and backups, we spoke at length with Mike Mihalik, Product Manager at LaCie. I had initially heard Mike mention a few quick thoughts on disk backups on an episode of the Digital Production Buzz with Larry Jordan. Part of the reason for our conversation was to clarify those comments, and part was to also delve a little deeper into Mike’s recommendations for backup processes and best practices.

If you’ve not yet experienced a catastrophic hard disk failure, this podcast may unsettle you a bit. And I’m glad if it does…all too often we hear the horror stories of hard disk crashes where the user has no backup. It only takes one such crash for most people to learn their lesson. Mike speaks at length about the many different ways you can lose hard drive data, and hopefully you’ll come away with a little more concern for your own backup processes, and take time to protect yourself properly in the event of a disk failure.

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