Keep All Raw Files or Give Up Hoarding Hard Drives?

Drakhen99 said:
So what do you store your footage on?

-John
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When I edit it's on my laptop, backed up to my NAS running RAID5. I also back up to a two drive RAID 1 USB external drive from my laptop and the NAS gets backed up too. However, once it's fully edited up I upload to YouTube. Once I've gone through the motions with the video on YouTube and it's published, I delete the footage.

I currently have seven videos uploaded but not published yet, so I've kept them locally too. They total 57.5GB. I've over 1,100 videos on my channel. Way too much to store locally. The only reason I keep them until published it that I've had a couple of videos appear to upload correctly but be corrupted on YouTube when I cam to add chapters, cards, etc.
 

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throttleup said:
I've got to ask whether these were all plugged-in-and-spinning drives, or drives that spent a long time on the shelf?

My impression is that hard drives fail after long usage, so the chances of failure reduce dramatically if they're not spinning.

So I need to know if I'm wrong.
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A mix of the two. I've had drives fail that are in my drive box (a shoebox) as well as drives go in a NAS and in computers. I've been doing this for a few decades now and lost a lot of drives over the years. I used to keep my drives spinning when using a NAS but let them spin down nowadays to save power and be quieter. Doesn't appear to have made a great deal of difference. The good thing about the NAS approach with RAID is that a single drive failure is a lot less painful and can be recovered. I still always recommend onsite and offsite backups of important files though.
 
Drakhen99 said:
It's the difference between electronic vs magnetic storage. SSDs hold a charge, and it's usually only guaranteed for a year. HDDs store data magnetically, which, while susceptible to magnets being placed too close, holds its data longer. The SSD's charge can weaken over time, losing data. That's cold storage, for when the disk [either type] is powered off and disconnected from a computer. If the disks are always powered on and connected to a computer, you run into mechanical failure on a HDD perhaps, or too many read/write cycles on a SSD [but this should be a relative non-issue at this point, with current SSD technology].

There's some apprehension by the IT folks I know that we don't have the empirical data surrounding SSDs like we do HDDs, since they haven't been around nearly as long.

Last year, I found a HDD circa 2007... plugged it in and it worked flawlessly. USB sticks were in their infancy at that point.

-John
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HDDs aren't really affected by magnets, especially modern drives that need heat / microwave energy plus a write head to create data. You would need some pretty powerful magnets to cause issues and it would likely be damage to the mechanisms and heads, rather than the platters.

I wouldn't trust a HDD for very long term storage. I use drive scrubbing every three months to keep my data fresh but most people use USB external drives and only find out they have problems when they try to extract the data from the drive

SSDs have the problem of limited write cycles. For most applications that's not a huge problem. For video editing with a lot of video it's easy to get to the point where the drive is nearly full and the write cycles of the empty area increase accordingly. This can cause a reduced life for the device overall. I've killed a 1TB SSD in my laptop with video editing in a few years.
 
Theodor said:
I think data rot is still a concern for hard drives, when just stored in the manner like @R-Rated described.
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Here is my oldest drive -
Oldest drive.jpg


Here is the oldest set if images on the drive

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Here are the oldest MP4s on the drive back when I first got my Hero 4 Silver -
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The video plays fine -

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Even old photos of me wearing nothing but my bathing suit look great!

11c709051caf062576c9013486c75bb2.jpg
 
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