Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/82522
Audio Storage Needs nated folder on the desktop. Retro- spect, a back-up and recovery soft- ware program, searches those des- ignated desktop folders for archive material every night. The data is copied to two separate AIT 3 tapes that are run simultaneously. One tape is kept at the studio and one tape is moved to an off-site storage location. Each morning a log report is generated, and that information is put into a separate system to keep track of tape location, tape size, date and project information. "It's so inexpensive to keep as much data as you can, the question then becomes how to sort it and make it relevant," he says. "Even though there are different archiving and Ultra-Sound's Ron DiCesare used the studio's BlueArc Mercury NAS to get assets from a 2008 Beggin' Strips spot for an updated version. sion gets moved from one room to another. At some point, someone is going to mistak- enly update, copy or delete the wrong ver- sion of the job. A singular networked source of all Pro Tools media and sessions would be a God-send." PURE AUDIO Paul Goldberg is the owner of Pure Audio (www.pureaudio.com) in Seattle, a full-ser- vice audio post facility that offers a variety of services, from mixing TV ads, to providing AFTRA & SAG union payroll services. Pure Audio has four Pro Tools suites that are all networked to an Apple Xserve, with three 1TB drives. Every evening, each work- station is backed up to the Xserve. Pure is currently looking into replacing their Xserve with a newer Mac-based server. "It's going to be a hard machine to replace," says Goldberg. "Each time you switch systems it's another thing to keep track of, and to make sure people are trained to use." Each audio suite works locally on a Pacific Pro Audio external drive. Those local drives are also cloned so if a drive failure should happen, a clone of that drive is avail- able immediately. Goldberg makes it a point to replace the local drives every two years, and as a result, he hasn't had one drive failure in the past 10 years. "We don't turn our machines off and on, we leave them on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. One of our employees here suggested we replace our drives every couple of years to get ahead of the curve. Why wait for a drive to fail? Drives aren't that expensive in relation to the overall value of the enterprise." Pure Audio typically finishes several ses- sions in a day. When a job is considered done, the engineer will copy it into a desig- 40 Post • September 2012 back-up solutions, Retrospect has been simple enough that it's been a good solution for us historically." Goldberg considers himself to be a data hoarder. He hates to throw things out. "I've never looked at having a project archived more than once as a bad thing. It's a good thing, because if you have a tape failure or something like that, it's on a different tape. I know people that just drop stuff onto a hard drive and when that hard drive is full, they move to a new hard drive and that's their like brand campaigns, and preemptively transfer that material to the new format. "We want to make sure we have access to it easily. It's kind of easy to prepare and hard to react when it comes to archiving." Pure Audio has relied on AIT 3 tapes for the past eight years, but Goldberg is cur- rently looking at how their company will back-up and archive data in the future. His main points of concern are what will hap- pen to the data every night, and where will it be stored? Will it only sit on-site, or will it be cop- ied to a cloud-type service as well? For long-term archiving, are they going to aban- don tape media for a RAID? Will it sit on- site or be sent to an off-site facility as well? "I really like the idea of the data living on somebody else's farm that is being main- tained. Now, there is an inherent risk in doing that, which is why we would still have the data in two locations. "The hope is that when we migrate to a new system, we will have an off-site solution that we almost never touch, except for test- ing. As we archive our material we're regu- larly testing our archiving system. We always try to be in touch with our material as best we can, so if there is an error we are catching it within a period of time where it still lives in multiple locations." Pure provided sound design and mix on this PGA spot and this piece for the Museum of Glass. system of archiving. To me, that sounds like a very risky system of archiving, because first, it's only in one place, and second, it's a mechani- cal medium. With a tape medium, it seems like there is always the potential to solve the problem, but with a drive medium, when they go bad, they're bad." Goldberg has been able to successfully restore jobs from AIT 3 tapes from eight years ago. For him, the trouble with restoring archived material doesn't come from the AIT 3 tape, it comes from the old format the ses- sion was saved in. Restoring multitrack ses- sions that are very old can be painful. Goldberg used to be on AMS Neve AudioFile and an old Avid system that doesn't exist anymore. Now, when they tran- sition from an outmoded format, they look at the types of projects that tend to be recalled, www.postmagazine.com TONO STUDIOS Juan Felipe Valencia is an audio engineer at Tono Studios in Santa Monica. Tono Studios (http://tonostudios.com) is a full-service audio post facility that specializes in advertis- ing for the Hispanic market. They've created commercials for Wendy's, Disney, Honda, McDonald's, T-Mobile and more. Tono Studios has three audio suites that are running Pro Tools 10. Sessions are creat- ed and saved locally on a dedicated internal audio drive on the Mac. All three rooms are networked to a central server that houses the most up-to-date versions of every ses- sion. When an engineer needs to work on a session, they simply copy it from the central server onto their local drive. Once they're finished with the session, they copy it back to the central server. In addition, each worksta-