 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. I wanted to record today a video about the technical logistical factors of backing up your video content. So there have been some really good videos on YouTube about how videographers and filmmakers can back up their precious video content. And those are really great, but something I haven't seen covered in so much depth is the kind of technical factors of well, how many backup copies should you have and where should those backup copies be in order for your video to be really, really well protected. So my standing in this is that I've been really interested in backup for a number of years. I've been writing about backups for both my freelance clients. I've written about backups for Linux magazine and Linux backups pretty extensively. So as a sort of backup enthusiast, I thought I would just give a few thoughts about where the best, what a good is robust strategy for backing up your videos might look like. So let's jump straight into this slide show I prepared. So the guiding principle for backups and this doesn't, it doesn't matter whether we're talking about video backups or audio backups or backing up documents or backing up websites, because ultimately we're just talking about data. The unique quality of video is that it's pretty heavy data wise. So if you're backing up a bunch of Word documents, it's probably going to be a while before you get even into the gigabytes, whereas if you are backing up the master files of your video projects or a bunch of bureau, you could very easily be generating something like a dozen gigs of data per day. So that's the kind of challenge I'll get into just in a small bit. Why the size of that data matters, because in certain circumstances, it does matter. In any event, the general rule for backups is what's called a three to one approach. And what this means essentially is that it's a methodology for de-risking data protection. Now, basically what that means is that you'll always want to have two backup copies and one of those backup copies should be located off site. The problem with having one backup copy, and this is something that a lot of these video tutorials say as well, you know, the way to back up your video is to just put it on an NAS, a network attached storage. And I think most serious videographers have an NAS or a media server, an NAS is just a specialized type of server for data storage. So the problem with that approach is that it's only one copy of your data. So if your office or your studio or whatever gets hit by a tornado or gets flooded or whatever, then you're going to be left without your original copies. Now, if you're a YouTuber and you're uploading your videos to YouTube, that technically, yes, it is sort of a copy because using YouTube Studio, you can download your own videos. But the problem there is that you're not going, you're going to be getting back the video files after YouTube's compression and they're going to have lost a substantial amount of quality. So you really want to have when we're talking about backups, don't rely on stuff like YouTube's backup mechanism as part of your strategy, you want to be protecting your original full quality master mixes, let's say. So the three to one rule here, we're talking about having your original data. So if it's active data, you want to have your data. So if you're working a video project, you want to have those raw clips and your project files and your overlays and whatever else you have, as well as video clips, and you're going to want to have that data backed up in two places. If you've wrapped up a video project, then the original data source, you can delete that file once it's properly backed up, but not no sooner than that happens. So I've given an example of how this could be done well and how this could be done poorly. So let's say I've done correctly, and let's start with the three copies of data, primary plus two backup. So if you have your master copy on your NAS, and it's in cloud storage, and you've got the originals, if you're still working on them, then you fulfill the first part of the three to one rule, you've got three extant copies of your data, the data you're working on, the first, the onsite backup on the NAS, and you've got it in the cloud. So you're good. Two different storage media. So basically what this means is, you know, when we're thinking about backup protection, we don't want we want to factor in all kinds of contingencies, whether those contingencies are electrical over surges, or just disk failure. So you wouldn't want to have two backup copies. You could say, oh, well, I'm supposed to have two backups. So I'm just going to put two backups on my computer. I'm going to have them on different disks. Now technically, those would be different storage media. So let's say you have two hard drives on your computer, and you're like, okay, I'm going to back it up to my computer, and I'm going to back it up to another drive of my computer. Firstly, that's going to fail the offsite test because neither of those are offsite. But secondly, what happens if the computer gets fried and all the disks in it get fried. So you want to diversify as much as possible. So done correctly to two different storage media. Well, one's on the NAS, one's in the cloud. So it's sitting in a Amazon or a backblaze or even a Google Drive or Dropbox data center. So if your NAS is fried or the disk fails, and that's the good thing about NAS, you do have redundancy. So you're protected from disk failure to a large extent. But nevertheless, I don't know, the NAS can can just fail. So then you've got your two different storage. Finally, offsite. So again, as I mentioned, the purpose of an offsite backup is because it does happen that houses get flooded or you're not using an NAS, you're just doing cold storage, and I'll talk about that later. And the disk fails so that your onsite backup is gone kaput. So you want to have an offsite so that any of these in any of these instances, that's not the only backup copy. So again, when we're talking about video, if you're uploading it to cloud platforms, and those cloud platforms are compressing, then you can consider that part of your backup strategy, because at best, you're going to be able to liberate from those clouds if they allow a data liberation function, don't take that for granted. But if they do, you're going to get a D, you're going to get a post compression video file. So that's why when we're talking about this, this specifically backup for video projects, we want to be making sure that we're backing up the full original copies. So here's a worked out example of a viable cloud backup workflow. So I have here, let's say you have your editing workbench or your workstation and you're working on your video clips. Once you're finished, and let's just say for simplicity's sake, you don't want to keep the raw footage, the raw clips, if you want to use them for stock, you've put them onto a stock folder on the NAS, if you want to, in other words, bureau, and you've got the finished projects on another volume in your NAS. So anything else is done. The project's a wrap. So in that case, once you've got to that point, we don't really require the primary data source, but we're going to have it firstly on the NAS. Now that's going to be backup one, while the project's going on. Then we're going to want to put that up to an offset backup. So in terms of how easy it is to actually achieve a three to one compliant backup workflow, well, it's actually pretty easy. If you happen to own a Synology NAS, and a lot of people do because Synology is like the leading brand of NAS's, then Synology has a very, very good tool built into DSM called Cloud Sync. And you can create very, very simple automations that will move volumes up to the cloud. So I could say, I'm going to have a volume on my NAS called stock, and I'm going to automatically sync everything that goes into the stock volume up to back plays. And you can even have it so that your stock goes to back plays and your finished projects go to Amazon S3, or Google Drive or Dropbox or any number. And this is totally automatic. Now the problem for folks like me is that if you unfortunately have a really bad home internet connection, or you know, there's just nothing better in your area, the only thing I can get is DSL in this part of Jerusalem, then this is a bit problematic because the Synology runs automatically the cloud sync in the background. That means if you're creating gigabytes of data per day, and you've got a really slow upload speed, there's pretty much always going to be data uploading on your network. And if your bandwidth is limited, then that's going to be limiting your bandwidth kind of constantly. So you'll be trying to watch Netflix or just do regular internet usage or upload finished videos to YouTube. And you'll find that the internet is painstakingly slow. So this workflow would be brilliant if you have a great internet connection, you've got something like symmetrical fiber, and you don't need to worry about these petty concerns. Then this is a really, really easy way to do it. Buy yourself a Synology NAS. I'm not selling Synology, I happen to own one. But this would be a very, very simple data workflow. Set up your volumes on the NAS, copy your folders over to the NAS, and then use cloud sync to set up automatic backup to the cloud. And you're going to have to pay for some back believe storage or for storage in S3. If you're doing this professionally, then it's just a business cost. Backlays is really, really affordable. And it's a lot, this is going to be a lot cheaper than trying to use something like Google Drive or Dropbox, which are not really intended for archival storage. If you're using AWS, then use the glacier class of storage on S3, because you're not expecting to have to use access this cloud storage at all. It's just a safeguard against the onsite backup being destroyed. And what happens if you do have a sucky home internet connection like me? Well, I can tell you one option because this is what I actually have to do. So firstly, you can get an NAS, that's not a problem. So you're doing your backup from your editing computer onto your NAS, you can either just manually upload copy and paste, or if you're a bit more sophisticated, you can set up a script pretty easily too. So you get your videos onto your NAS. Then what happens regarding the off site? So this is where it gets a little bit trickier. So you've got a couple of options. One is that if again, talking about Synology, they have a program called Hyperbackup. And Hyperbackup is intended to back up the NAS, meaning not just a volume on the NAS, it's supposed it's intended for backing up the whole machine, the whole physical machine, whoops. But you can also just use it to backup parts of it. And the good thing about Hyperbackup is it's a incremental backup approach. So you're not going to have to back up the whole volume every single time. In backup, you have full backups, differential backups and incremental backups. And you don't want to be doing a full backup if you can avoid it. So Hyperbackup is a really nice utility within the DSM, Synology DSM tool suite. And so what you could do, the problem about Hyperbackup, let's say you have a four bay NAS that's holding about three terabytes of video. Now, it's designed to mirror either the NAS or volumes onto one external media. Now, you could probably find some way to connect a whole NAS into NAS 2 into NAS 1 and then bring over NAS 2 to your friend's place. That's kind of a crazy, crazy thing to do. There's another Synology tool there for buddying up with a friend. He also has a Synology NAS and you can move, you can sync across the internet. But again, if your internet is sucky, if your internet is not sucky, I think you're better off doing the cloud. If your internet is sucky, I think you're probably better off doing this. So I can't really see a use case when using that utility. I can't remember off the top of my head what it's called, wouldn't make sense. So here's the sucky internet use case is with the caveas in mind about hyper backups limitation. What you could do is hyper backup to a HDD to a hard drive and keep that hard drive in your office or in a friend's house. And then every, you know, every month, every two weeks, every week, if you wanted to, you just do the hyper backup again, update the offsite backup and move that to your friend's house. That's called discrotation. So that would be the option there. It's obviously more inconvenient. The beauty of the cloud backup approach is modern, right? People are using the cloud for offsite storage now and not stuff like keeping disks in their car or well, don't do your car in your friend's house or whatever. It's ugly. If you have internet great, I advise doing this. If you don't have good internet, and I'm doing this because I know a lot of people are like me, they know how to do this, but they're like, well, great, but my upload speed is like two megabits per second. That's not going to fly. So this is another option you can use any backup approach is better than no backup approach in my book. So even though this is kind of cumbersome, you're going to have to upload hard drives and use enclosures repeatedly and go over and back to your friend's house. It's effort that if video is your livelihood or just your passion, I think it's worth doing this once a month won't inconvenience most people too much. Constraints and limitations involved in this slow upload speeds. So this is my problem. Cloud backups become painstakingly slow and no great residential connections can hamper bandwidth. So that's something I experience is my upload. My bandwidth is so bad that like when I'm uploading to YouTube, my download gets slow. So if you've also got such bad internet, this is a problem. So the solution is use physical offsite disk replication. When better internet becomes available, store in the cloud. So I'm waiting for the day fiber internet, symmetrical internet and good bandwidth becomes available here. In which case, I will be very rapidly switching over to this strategy. The second problem you could run into is you're just generating tons of data. You're, I don't know, you're a video fiend and you're generating terabytes and petabytes and exabytes of video. In which case the cloud could become very, very expensive. So you have to do a cost analysis comparing the cost of cloud storage with the cost of physical data storage. And if you do that, you might find that the physical data storage comes out substantially cheaper. Especially if you're using tape. So LTO as a storage class is still more affordable than HDD hard drives. The caveat is that if you want to use tape, it's harder to find tape nowadays because it's it's a pretty obscure technology at this point in the consumer realm. And tape LTO machines are also more expensive. So if you want to just use HDD for physical storage, you can buy a hard drive enclosure for like 30 bucks. You can buy a hard drive in any computer store and you're good. If you want to go down the LTO approach, you're going to have to spend more upfront on your CAPEX capital expenditure to buy them to buy an LTO machine, then you're going to have to buy your tapes from a specialist supplier. So it's a little bit more headache, but it can be done. Final point here. The difference is between cold and NAS storage for your onsite backup. So this is a video. This is a picture I took yesterday. I decided because I'm a data paranoid Android, I want to keep my NAS for backing up the good quality stuff. In other words, the projects are care about. And the stuff I don't really care about preserving the original resolution, I put this video in that category B role in that category. It's like, you know, I don't want to lose it. I want to have I want to cover myself. But if there is data rod, it's not the end of the world. So cold storage would mean just storing your data on a shelf. So let's say you want to put your bureau onto a hard drive like I've done here, and you just want to keep that in an anti static bag ideally, and sitting on your shelf. That's cold storage. The downgrades the problem with cold storage is that it's the data is susceptible to bit rot. Unfortunately, all to the best of my knowledge, all storage currently is. You also don't have RAID. So on the NAS you have, if you've got multiple disks, you have you're actually protected against disk failure. The NAS can survive, can survive disk failure. On the plus side, if you're just keeping it on your shelf and periodically moving data onto it, it's disconnected from electricity from power. So if you had some freak electricity surge that blew through all your protections in your house or in your studio, the cold storage should survive that. There's a chance the NAS could be fried. On the plus side for NAS storage, it's kind of more professional, I would say as a generality. And it's always there on the network. So if you want to move stuff onto your cold storage, you need to plug it in. You need to, if you've got an enclosure, power that up. Whereas the NAS is just live on the network. That's literally what it is, network attached storage. You've got RAID. I mean, it's really hardware that's optimized for data storage. I know my Synology NAS has some technologies for constantly checking the integrity of the disks. So it's a really, NASs are beautiful devices. This is what they excel in is building a mini data center on your network. So what I'm doing personally is a mixture of the two actually. For my primary on site storage, I'm using NAS. For the stuff I don't care about that I don't want taking up space on the NAS, I'm throwing it on to some hard drives. And I'm trying to move stuff off site in the best way possible to me. It would be great to do cloud backup. Unfortunately, my internet sucks too much. So I'm doing the best I can basically. So I hope this video is useful if you're interested in backup approaches for larger data files like video files, even AutoCAD projects and stuff like that. These are some ways you can use in order to protect and safeguard your hard, creative data. Thank you guys for watching. If you'd like to get more videos from me, please subscribe to this YouTube channel.