Back Up (Some Of) That Local Data!
I previously posted about using the local workstation as a data store. I concluded that local storage for some important data is an inevitability, and that’s ok as long as it’s backed up.
And I have yet to work at a studio where more than a few workstations had a formal local backup process in place. I believe this is mostly due to how rarely we lose work to catastrophic failures. There’s usually plenty of advance warning from a hard drive before it barfs, giving you time to move over to a new drive. If it ain’t broke often, no reason to fix it in advance. Even in the case of a total sudden failure, it only takes a day or two of re-imaging the OS and reinstalling apps to get back to being productive.
I tend to agree. I don’t think the occasional hard drive failure is worth a general studio-wide full workstation backup policy. It’s just too much work, storage, and time, and is going to cost far more than it will save. Instead, let’s have a more targeted approach. For most people in the studio, I prefer one or more of the options I’m going to enumerate below.
Local-Based Backups
This is the method I use. Even though I just said it’s not a huge deal to have a total failure, some people (like me) are ultra paranoid about losing even the smallest amount of work or time. And for that, nothing beats a local full-drive USB backup.
How?
Big fat USB drives are cheap. You can trade size and price for the performance you don’t need. I’d also get one around twice the size of the main workstation drive array if possible. That way two or three backup rotations plus incrementals can be kept going at once (assuming backup compression).
For software I’d get something that uses the shadow volume service to do copies so it can pick up the in-use files. I particularly like Ghost even though I loathe most things Symantec makes. It’s important to set up frequent (two to four times a day) incremental backups. Set them to low priority to avoid bothering you while you work. And set up automatic replacement of old backups when the drive is full. The system has to be fully automated and easy to use so you can forget about it until you need it when something goes wrong. Ghost even has a nice feature to let you use Google Desktop to search your various backups, a little reminiscent of Apple’s Time Machine.
I’d pick this over a mirrored RAID setup any day because you get incremental backups, and you get an easy way to restore data if your workstation dies and you need to move to a new machine quickly.
But Why?
Why am I so paranoid about this? A couple reasons. The less important one actually is the total loss issue that I mentioned earlier. The main reason I have frequent incremental full machine backups going is that I frequently make incremental boneheaded mistakes in my work.
The most common scenario is where I’m working on some small task, and in the middle it explodes into a giant task. Before I know it I’m four days in with 50 files checked out and crap I just accidentally reverted a bunch because I thought I was working on my other client for that quick bug fix someone needed. Or a day later I confidently go down some new mental path and redo a bunch of work without realizing that this is the wrong way, and now I need to undo back to the previous day. This is especially useful when coding a little drunk after lunch. But if the incremental is only half a day old at worst, you’re not in too much trouble.
This problem is so common for me that I’ve started building some tools to fix it on top of the incremental backup. Right now I’m eyeing git for ideas because it has features like stash and bisect. I’m also considering adding on a continuous backup system (like Norton GoBack or perhaps I’ll mess with Previous Versions a bit more). Like I said, I’m paranoid.
Incidentally, this would be a lot less of a problem for me if P4 had a local repository concept like git and mercurial and other more more modern source control systems have. Then I could check in as often as I wanted for backups and revision history as I worked, and get all my favorite source control tools to help develop.
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