One of the constant questions and conversations in our new tapeless acquisition and workflow world is how do I back-up and archive materials. There are a lot of options and opinions. Hard drives are as cheap and as large as they have ever been. Blu-ray has potential but it’s still not affordable or even readily and easily available on the Mac. Online back-up options exist but that’s not really an option for a few hundred gigs is RED footage that you want to save … forever. That leaves linear tape as one of the only real, affordable options. Some people seem to have an issue with moving to tapesless acquisition and post only to return to tape at the very end of the process. IMHO it’s more about finding a reliable option that will be there 5 – 10 years in the future without the regular intervention that hard drives require. But what is best? Larry Jordan offered up his opinions last year. Jon Chappell at Digital Rebellion recently had a great round-up of all the options out there today. For a great discussion on backing up to tape then head over to this forum on reduser.net. A gentleman named Tim Jones recently popped up there offering to answer questions about tape backup systems. And RED users need to backup as much as anyone!

Tim says: “From old (ancient ?) QIC, DLT, or MLR/SLR to the latest DAT, LTO, AIT or SDLT, I’ve either worked with the design team, or with the physical devices. I currently deal with Mac OS X, all of the Unix variants, and Windows platforms.While I work for a backup software company, I promise to keep my answers non-software product specific as I try and stay on top of the posts here.” A great discussion has come about in this thread with a lot of pros and cons throughout the thread’s 10+ pages. If backing up to data tape has been on your mind then give this interesting forum post a read.