Storage (Patreon)

Like pretty much everyone that's worked with video as long as we have, we've built up a huge amount of footage over the years. In the first image, you can see some of our earliest external hard drives which are bulky and weird shaped. They have to be close to 20 years old at this point! 

For the majority of the time we've been doing Half in the Bag and beyond, we've stored all our raw footage and edits on these Western Digital drives and when one fills up, we just move on to a new one. We've got a ton of these drives now! Way more than what you see in these photos. They're still great for storing everything and we still have all our raw footage from pretty much everything we've ever shot on them, minus a couple of drives that have just stopped working over the years. 

A year or two ago, we finally got a NAS server to have a secure and complete archive of every video we've ever made all in one place. If you're not familiar with a NAS, it stands for Network Attached Storage and it's basically just a bay of hard drives that all work together to create one big storage pool. All our raw footage is still just backed up on those Western Digital drives, but the final videos are stored on the NAS (in a RAID 6 configuration so if one or even two of the drives fails, all the data is still safe) and another storage unit is synced to it via USB to create a backup copy of the archive. With this set up, we should be in pretty good shape of never losing anything important from a hard drive failure.

Before the NAS archive, if we wanted to use a clip from an older video, we'd have to dig through our dozens of external drives to find the right one that has what we're looking for on it or we'd just download the youtube version and use that. But now we have every video and every short film and every feature we've ever done for the past 20+ years all saved in one place in full resolution. Organization is fun!