#4 "Archive vs. Backup"

Speaker 0 00:00 Welcome to the workflow show. I'm Meryl Davis, along with Nick gold. And this week we are going to talk archive versus backup. Yeah. Backup versus archive. Or as we like to say, backup, backup, backup versus versus versus archive archive archive. We actually didn't have enough money to do the sound effects. So we just had Nick repeat himself. I repeat myself a lot. It has nothing to do with money though. I don't think, um, so what is the difference, Nick, between backup and backup and archive? Gosh, people tend to use these phrases interchangeably. They, yeah. Bad, bad people. No, we love people, but there is a lot of confusion about what does the word backup mean and what is a backup? And what's a good backup versus not such a good backup. And why do you want to back up what is an archive? What makes a good archive? Speaker 0 00:54 It's, they're kind of different things. And we'll talk a little bit about how you may be able to kill a couple of those birds with one stone. You don't have to use that. Use that phrase like five times today. You know, you want to kill some birds with stones. We don't want to talk about killing when it comes to backup and archive, because we want to think happy thoughts, and you don't want to have to use your backups. So that's a good place to start is what is, what is the purpose of a backup? When we talk about backup with our clients, you know, the word backup obviously implies, this is a back up, which means your data is into place. It's in the original location or one primary location, and it's backed up to a secondary, or I'm going to use a fancy word here. Speaker 0 01:39 Tertiary. Did you know that Wikipedia is a tertiary source? I'll take your word for it. Sure. So, you know, a backup means you've got your data in more than one place at the same time. And why would you want to do that? Well, I know that if I lost my work, I would go insane. So perhaps why might you lose your work? Let me give you a few scenarios, right? Cause this is what about when you design a backup system and we like to kind of use the full phrase, a disaster recovery backup system, because this is that secondary or third AK tertiary location that your data will reside in, in case there's some kind of a bad thing, a disaster. So how can you recover from your disaster with this backup system? So thus the phrase, disaster recovery backup, well, here's some things that you might need to design a system to protect you against. And there's, there's kind of a range of horrible scenarios that we get to kind of enjoyably think about acts of God. Yeah. That's like a legal term. Can you believe that they still actually use that in, in like, like insurance? Yeah. It's like, I'm reading a document. How am I supposed to, I picture like a lightning bolt coming from heaven with a booming voice. Speaker 0 02:53 We are in a church that was struck by lightening. So perhaps you should, uh, be judicious in your representation of acts of God who Ned lightning doesn't strike twice. What are we kidding? I share hubs. I'm knocking on wood right now, but, but knocking on wood is not the best approach to take when protecting your data or not protecting your data. That was an excellent segue. So, so let's, let's talk about a range of act of, of bad scenarios that can occur and, and you know, how they impact the type of system you develop for, for disaster recovery backup. So, um, let me, let me run the gamut here, right? The most common reason why people lose a file that they might need is probably because they accidentally deleted it or accidentally saved over it. That's by far and away, the most common reason why you don't have a file. Speaker 0 03:44 And that could be like one file you deleted. It could be someone who wiped an entire directory. And we've had a lot of scenarios where someone like accidentally formats an entire volume or drive that they, they they're using some little utility to do a format. We had a client format and entire sand volume once they were using some little, like, I want to say it was like a little Lissy hard drive utility that just formatted your drive instead of disc utility. And they thought they were selecting one volume when they hit format. And it was their sand volume instead of their FireWire drive. And there is no undo for that sort of thing. Yeah. Formatting is pretty final. And, and you know, again, remember there are sometimes ways around it. It generally involves sending your drive off to drive savers and spending thousands of dollars in the hope that they can recover some of the data forensic drive manipulators. Speaker 0 04:39 It's like, I picture like robots and like people in those, like, you know, clean rooms with the, the, what they called the bunny suits, you know, once upon a time, I actually, uh, actually did work across from a, from a driver recovery place. And, uh, there weren't any robots, but, uh, cute girls had lunch breaks. So really? Yeah, no, it was a bunch of really nerdy, cute girls working on their fix and hard drives, not a bad place to spend my life. I find that fascinating on many levels, I'm sure we could do a whole podcast about a data recovery and cute nerdy girls. That'll be episode. I don't know. That'll be the way down in the priorities. So accidents, accidents, and accidentally wiping something. That's that's number one. And that's very common. So you want to have a backup system that lets you get back to a particular file or a bunch of files that maybe got saved over. Speaker 0 05:32 Maybe got deleted. Maybe you want that version from like, Oh, like last Tuesday before we made all those changes and saved over the file. Cause we're not doing different versions of everything it's worth just saving over something. So you want that kind of granular ability to reach backwards in time at eight, either a very particular file that was at a very particular version or a bunch of things from a certain time, right? That's scenario one. So scenario two is when we get a little more catastrophic, which is like your storage system goes belly up, like it has a hardware failure, the actual little database that we call a file system on that volume gets corrupted in some fundamental way. That just makes it very difficult to access. Maybe the entirety of it, maybe the entire storage area network, the whole sand. And this is really rare kind of stuff we're talking about. Speaker 0 06:24 Right. But you know, disaster recovery backups are like insurance. You actually kind of hope you never have to use it, but it's good to have if those bad things do happen. Cause then like you're out of business and just customers hate you. I wouldn't it be worthwhile also mentioning this sort of catastrophic level of, uh, of data loss that, uh, an accidental deletion that a, there's also a level of, um, uh, protection built in by backing up against intentional and malicious acts. Well, so yeah, that's another thing. I mean, you may have an employee that you can, who decides to get a little van to listic on their way out the door. Um, it does happen again, these aren't happy things to think about, but uh, it's something to protect against someone who kind of maliciously wipe stuff out. So we're kind of like getting worse and worse here, right? Speaker 0 07:11 So we've got like the accidentally saving over something or deleting something we've got, Ooh, my storage system had some kind of catastrophic hardware failure file system failure. Well now let's take it even further. Let's say your building burns down. I like to use the whole proverbial Godzilla walks through Baltimore and steps on your building. But to me, that's just my gods that we'll be doing in Baltimore. He's got better places to be. There's probably a lot of toxic waste here to cause a Godzilla incident. I feel like if he ended up anywhere around here, he'd be in Chicago first and then he, he get tired, but it certainly is a sea creature Merrill. How's he getting to what's he like traveling the river ways he just hits. I can't trust America, I guess. Yeah. He's kind of like the Paul Bunyan, even though, you know, the thing is the great lakes, I guess, are heavily polluted to the point where they catch on fire occasionally. Speaker 0 07:59 Yeah. And, and so he could make erupt from the lakes teleported to the under base layer at the great lakes fits into my whole theory. That Godzilla is really an interdimensional entity. I agree. And then he walks around the nation, breaking buildings, like some weird Johnny and stepping on your data. Yes. But when I talk about Godzilla, stepping on your building, it's my way of saying something catastrophic. That's affecting your entire geographic area. Your building went up in flames or worse than that three floors above you. There's a fire, but it sets off the buildings, sprinkler systems, water seeps down and starts to dripping on your, your, your equipment rack, where your, your raids are living. That's part of your storage area network or on an individual hard drive. Something that like didn't even directly affect you. But then literally came raining down on your data. Speaker 0 08:49 That would be Mothra. I mean, it could be a hurricane coming up the Bay, something impacts your overall location and it's not, you haven't just lost your data. You've like maybe lost your office or maybe you lost your whole facility. But the reality is computers can be replaced as long as your people are safe. Obviously they can, they can pick back up. You want to make sure of that. Of course. But you know, you can replace the physical equipment. You probably got it insured. It can be repaired. You can buy a new computer. The thing that you can't replace is your darn data. The data is more important than the actual physical it systems that it's stored on. So right about now is where somebody is going well. Well, that's what my backup. I mean, my archive that I have that in place, don't I, or what's the difference you're you're talking about backup right now and catastrophic events. Speaker 0 09:44 So why, why do I need archive? If, if what you're talking about right now, it has a lot to do with backup and Mothra and Gaza. So we're talking about systems that get you back up and running as quickly as possible in case of some bad scenario. So we've just talked about a number of bad scenarios, everything from accidentally deleting a file up to Godzilla, walking through your office building, right? You're going to design a system differently, depending on which of those eventualities you yourself are trying to protect against. And I'll give you an example, right? Like if you want to build a system that protects against your building burning down, you need to get your data off site. And it's you're in the media industry, you've got a lot of data. So that means it's not going to be to the cloud or through your internet connection. Speaker 0 10:31 It means you probably need to ship data tapes to a secondary location. That's geographically isolated from your primary location. However, a bunch of data tapes sitting in iron mountain, that's a company that, that, that warehouses, these things in a very protected environment sort of become a ubiquitous term for that kind of like, cause there aren't a whole lot of companies that do it, frankly. It's like Kleenex. Yeah. Or iPod. Yeah. But iron mountain. So sometimes people will say, Oh, we're sending it out to iron mountain. And they may not actually be referring to the company iron mountain, but they may actually have a literal iron mountain. Like that's their focus were Godzilla, Mothra play bridge. I like that. I'm going to have happy thoughts about that. So that's very robust. It protects you against your building burning down, but it doesn't necessarily let you get back up and running quickly. Speaker 0 11:21 Right. So I'm just making the point here that sometimes a disaster recovery backup system that's really good against protecting against one of these eventualities is not necessarily the right one to protect against the other eventualities. But let me throw a flip side at you. Okay. Let's say you got 10 editors connected to a sand system and something really bad and catastrophic not to your building, but that just disrupts their ability to get to all of the data on the sand. Like, like the, the sand file system goes belly up. Which of course very rarely actually never really happens with systems that Chesapeake systems puts in. But asterick, it's, it's it's theoretically possible. These are it systems. They can be subjected to very statistically unlikely failures, right? So if you have like 10 editors connected to a San, and for some reason the sand system gets corrupted. Speaker 0 12:16 You may want that. What I like to call the proverbial Frankenstein switch that you like, you throw this little switch and you flip everyone over to like yesterday's version of the sand that may actually call for a secondary sand system right there in your building that people can very quickly be interconnected to, you know, and you think a secondary volume and they can just pick right back up and start working days loss of work versus a week potential week to two weeks loss of work of like restoring from tapes and having to get them back from the, the magical iron mountain of your right. I imagine there's an iron mountain ride kind of like in Disneyland with a bunch of LTO data tapes where you're like, you know, you go up to the top and you don't want to stand up on that ride though. Speaker 0 13:01 Cause it might cut your head off that's that's right. So I heard that happened with space mountain ones, but is that just a rumor or do you think that actually nothing, you know, I've heard that story so many times that I would just defer to snopes.com to be sure B for sure. I don't want to be the guy that says we'll put that in the show notes guys. We will.com whether anyone actually ever stood up on space, mountain and space mountain. This is my memory talking, so it's probably wrong. But I think there has been documented instances of decapitation on roller coasters. I'm sure there have perhaps in Anaheim, California. Oh, but maybe like the off brand of Disneyland, like no doors <inaudible> land, it's a little Russian theme park that nobody goes to, but uh, you know, there's Morkie mouse and uh, Donald dork. Um, I love it. Speaker 0 13:50 It's totally that my family would have gone to when I was growing up. Right. Yeah, no, we, I just went to Dutch Wonderland. Nice. Yeah. Good old Dutch country. So I think this, this is a good place to sort of talk about the distinction between all that fun stuff and archive. Yes. What, you know, what is the difference between archive because they're used so ubiquitously and synonymously that I don't think a lot of times people know that they're even using the wrong semantic terminology for describing what their needs might be. Well let's let's okay. So backup is to get you back up and running in a Jiff if X, Y, or Z horrible things happen to your desktop. That's right. It's almost like business continuity. Exactly what it is. So archive. I like to describe as what's your plan about what to do with your data when it needs to go and retire, right? Speaker 0 14:46 It's like the old age home for your data shuffleboard. So I'll give you an example of the real world scenario here. These days. A lot of people, most people are shooting video on camera systems that never generate a videotape in the first place. It's going to a solid state drive or a hard drive. That's getting recycled on a very regular basis. And when we were shooting videotapes, you almost kind of instantaneously, at least had this quote unquote archive of the raw footage itself on a videotape that you could pop onto a shelf and be relatively sure probably would hold up for a good 10 or so years. Maybe even more, as long as you kept it in a good environmental condition and it wasn't getting rained on or direct sunlight or you know, all that bad stuff. It's strange how we've sort of lost that. Speaker 0 15:33 We lost it. Right? Digital file is an ephemera. Now like you, you shoot it, you drop it, you work with it. And then when you're done the project, where's that stuff go, it's so convenient. Right? We love tapeless, Oh my God, tapeless workflow. It kind of like no one was doing tapeless and then everyone was doing tapeless and it feels like that was almost overnight. And w you know, when I joined Chesapeake eight years ago, you know, w w w w we were just starting to develop tapeless workflows for more and more people. And when, you know, I blinked my eyes and it was a few years later, it was like selling people, things that generated video tape was like never happening anymore. So, so we've got all this data. Maybe you're putting it on a raid. Maybe you're putting on a nice, robust storage system and you're working on it and you're executing a project and it's backed up. Speaker 0 16:23 So if anything bad happens, you're all square, but then you're done with it, right. You've delivered your project, but you don't want to throw anything away. Right. I certainly don't. I mean, from, from a video editor perspective, uh, if I'm shooting a project, that's a, that's HD, and there's a significant amount of B roll. That is a nondescript. Um, I, I wanna, I want to keep it there because, you know, we rented that crane once to get an aerial shot, and I'm not gonna rent that crane in a second time, especially if I have it exists, you might find a way of re monetizing it. Your client three years later might ask for a slight recut. Cause they were, you know, they remembered that you had some extra footage of someone you didn't use in the final cut, but they suddenly became important. And they kind of want to get access to that footage. Speaker 0 17:05 You don't know, but no one wants to throw away anything these days. And it's really not, it's not very cost effective because you are generating, um, a commodity here. So the model can't be throw away the commodity when you're done. It should be how's the best way to manage it. Because I mean, it was built into tape workflow without an issue. There are rooms and rooms and rooms full of tape. You just go in, okay, let's pull the tape. It wasn't really convenient to ever get back at that stuff. But still at least there was a, it's a, it's really about a perception. It was a piece of mind that you knew that you had it somewhere. Should you need it? The, the actual amount of retrieval from archive, virtual rare, it's rare that you actually ended up needing it. Right. And that's the way it should be. But, um, Speaker 1 17:50 But you can, if you need to, but you know, so the most important thing for me as an editor is, yes, I want things archived, but I don't want them archive so deep that I gotta, I gotta like start digging, um, and spend an entire day looking for a single file. Speaker 0 18:07 Here's the issue, right? It's like, we want to have this stuff longterm. What are we going to do? If it's all just a file to begin with, and we didn't even have a video tape. Well, let's just throw it on the lessee. FireWire drive and throw it in the closet, along with 50 others. And just hope for the best. This is a bad idea, folks. So little less than here, people hard drives are a really crappy longterm archival, medium, hard drives are actually made to be spinning when they are working and being used regularly in the little nice little magnetic platters are moving around. They hold up better than if they're not doing anything, sitting on a shelf unpowered for years at a time, they actually will be more likely to freeze up when they're not in use. And if you have a big pile of FireWire drives or USB drives that are sitting in a closet somewhere, not really getting accessed, and you are harboring the fantasy that someday six, seven, eight years down the road, you'll be able to just find the right one, pluck it off the shelf, plug it into your computer, it'll fire right up and just you'll be able to use it just like the day you, you throw it in that closet to forget about keep harboring that fantasy. Speaker 0 19:23 It's it's a, it's a fantasy. I mean, you might get lucky. Speaker 1 19:27 Yeah, you might get lucky, but you know, it didn't happen for me with my jazz drive. Oh my God. Jazz drives. I was so excited when the thing stunk. I mean, Iomega had the stranglehold on the market for quite some time. So great. Zip 100. My God. Remember when the zip two 50 came on, I was like 250 megs on one zip disk. I am good. Old days. I can fit like 300 mini files on this thing. Speaker 0 19:52 And then jazz came out and they looked cool and they were slightly bigger and they just didn't work. I mean, I've never had a jazz drive actually last more than like two months. We're not an Iomega partner. Are we? I think technically we are, but that's old. Speaker 1 20:08 Yeah. They've gone through, through quite a number of structural changes within their organization over the last 15, 20 years, but not to, not to, you know, go into the past and complain about a country. Speaker 0 20:19 So, um, but hard drives are an awful archive medium. They're not really intended to be that hard drives get less reliable over time. As I've heard some folks say your hard drive will die. It's inevitable. They, they are very highly complex miniaturized micro mechanical system who here has had a hard drive, fail everyone. Speaker 1 20:43 I can't like ask whoever's in the room with right now. Just ask them, have you had a hard drive? Fail? All right. They all said yes. Right. And that's the interactive portion of it. Like a pair of hard drives. Even if you, Speaker 0 20:57 You do a raid one mirror or you duplicate the manually, none of them fails. They're both going to fail. Eventually. Maybe you've bought yourself a little bit of more time, you know, a hard drive might be okay for a short term, like a year or a couple of years. But when you start getting into like, Oh five years, six years, seven years, eight years more it's awful. So archive systems are systems that are specifically designed for this long term retention of your data in mind. This is the thing that kind of just needs to be there just in case, Speaker 1 21:30 Right? Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and I would also, you know, just, this is a, a prevalent issue. Oh, it's a huge issue. If, you know, if we can just sort of pull back and look at it from a sort of a socioeconomic standpoint, um, way to get collegiate on this whole conversation. What I'm, what I'm trying to say here is like, look, I'm going to write an essay. Yes. It's my thesis. It's my senior thesis. We're going to wait. We're all paying close attention. Yeah. What are archeologists going to look at? As far as history is concerned in a hundred years, I think it's going to be a black hole man. Cause all of our, all of our data, I mean, there's nothing tangible anymore. And then we're not, we don't have the, the, you know, the foresight to, to archive and maintain just this inordinate amount of data. It's really sad. This is going far and far beyond just data for video archive. I mean, this is, this is something Speaker 0 22:27 It's a pretty big deal and we're, we're quickly entering this paperless society. This, you know, medium LIS society where it's all about the ones and zeros and less about the stuff that they're actually on. And a lot of organizations have not come up with really intact ways of dealing with this. And that makes a really good point that I tried to make sure our clients know about. I like to stress that archive is actually a process. Archive is not a system you buy once. And then it's taken care of archive is not a particular medium you decide on. And once you've made that decision and you got your data on it, you never have to think about it again, the reality is, you know, some people, you know, argue that a data tape can last 30 years or a blue Ray disc can last a hundred years or a goal to DVD can last 500 years, whatever their argument may be. The reality is none of these archive, physical mediums really are worth counting on for more than 10 or 15 years. Speaker 1 23:34 Yeah. I mean like, uh, and you know, to, to put it anecdotally, uh, how many companies that have instituted archive policies are using archive systems Speaker 0 23:46 2000 to you. You might like the actual drives tend to break down and become unavailable sooner than the media breaks down. So if you've got a bunch of media sitting around that still might be good, but you can't get at it. It's just as much as meaningless, you know? So that's something to bear in mind. You know, you, you're going to have to probably turn over your archives every 10 to 15 years, just so you're keeping the ones and zeros that you've put so much energy into generating and storing in the first place. You're putting them onto some medium that, that, you know, actually makes sense. You know, I was at a, at a client the other day, they've got a wall of videotapes and I was trying to explain to them that if they implement an LTO data tape system, an LTO five system that we've been talking to them about, that's literally that wall of videotapes is going to get consolidated down to like two tiny little shelves worth of data tapes. Speaker 0 24:40 Cause it's just such a much more dense information storage, medium, and you know, 10, 15 years from now, we'll probably have these little like nano hollow cubes or whatever that, that, you know, fit on your fingernail and store their phones. You put in your hand, like in total recall, it's just the new total recall, not the old one. It's like turning into a thing where we have to make a total recall of reference everything we talked about to a recall last week, you were like you made some Johnny cab reference from the original that was before the new total recall came out. And I was actually very disappointed that there wasn't any Johnny cab and the new total recall was very sad about that. We won't mention what they actually did keep in the new total recall. We don't want to, not only has it not really appropriate, but it's a spoiler Arnold Schwarzenegger, not in it. Speaker 0 25:28 No, no. Um, so to recap, so, so archive is a process. You gotta choose a medium that's intended for long term. Um, these days we tend to be mostly recommending data tape, but that who knows if that'll be the case in 10 or 15 more years, when it's time to start thinking about migrating your, your data tapes to something new. Well, you know, I mean, we see such exponential growth in the bandwidth of the data that we handle. Uh, you know, it used to be, Oh, I CA I couldn't even have a system that handles, uh, you know, uh, all DV 25 was the big data that most people were dealing with. So, so we're seeing that exponential growth who knows what kind of a way we have to address this. And your data is only going to keep growing over time. So, you know, the other thing I like to stress about an archive system is, is you're, you're gearing it around the longterm. Speaker 0 26:24 You want a medium that's appropriate for that. You know, that you're not going to need to recall. Data tape is really ideal today. The nice thing about LTO is that they've got a really, you can go to the LTO ultra premium consortium's website, and we'll do a link to that in the show notes as well. And basically look at the roadmap that they have published. So you can see where the future generations of LTO data tape are going. But you know, the thing about archive is you want your archives to be backed up as well. That's right. You don't want just a single data tape because that's subject to all of the same problems that your, your, the storage had when it was just sitting on your rate or what hole locate your data tape. Here's the thing about archive, right? The, the, the, the ultimate archive system is storing multiple flavors of video of the same file. Speaker 0 27:16 Cause you want to make sure that you're, you're, you're archiving stuff in a Kodak and format. That's actually going to be relevant, you know, down the road, multiple mediums. So you're really making sure that not only is it on a data tape, but maybe you've got it on something else as well and multiple geographic locations. So if something bad happens to your literal or proverbial iron mountain, you've got it somewhere else too. And, you know, that's the ideal archive system. Now, the reality is not everyone is really in a position to implement that level of a system. But gosh, like all of these things, something is better than nothing. And you, you know, make the best decision you can today with the budget you have available to you, but stack of FireWire drives and kinda cut it. So what about SSDs? You're talking to me about spinning disc. Speaker 0 28:07 You know, I can't use it as a backup or archive format because, you know, it's not intended to sit for prolonged periods of time, but I'm a smart and savvy and user, and I know about this SSD stuff, and I know there's no spinning disks on that. Why can't I use no moving parts? Yeah. What we've been LTO tapes technically have moving parts. That's true. So what, what am I thinking the right way? Or what if I were to tell you about cosmic rays? What if you were to tell me, would that enable a purchase of SSP cause horrible mutant creatures, like Godzilla and Mothra, how do you think they learn how to play bridge? It's ironic that that is something so kind of esoteric sounding as cosmic rays actually as a factor here in your data storage. So we have all of this like invisible electromagnetic energy. Speaker 0 29:00 We're joking. No dude, I'm being absolutely literal. Oh, okay. I saw like we literally have all of these electromagnetic energy fields, including cosmic Rose from space flowing around all the time. And the problem is, is that they can flip bits in our storage mediums and lead to data corruption. And the longer you have something sitting, the more prone it is to just this corruption of the data because of the presence of electromagnetic energy fields flowing around it all. We're going to have to include some of this in the show notes. Cause I am not convinced you're not, you don't think I'm making this up. I mean, it sounds interesting. It sounds, I mean, it sounds valuable, but so what does that mean pro SSDs is that they seem to be bearing out as a not ideal longterm storage, medium as far as the resiliency of the actual physical medium itself. Speaker 0 29:55 And they can be more prone over the long term, especially in a constantly unpowered state, like sitting in a shelf somewhere. Um, so they are not necessarily looking like they're going to be a terribly robust longterm storage medium, but maybe for a backup, a short term backup solution, you have backup. They could be good again, but here's the other problem with SSD. The cost is so much higher than basically any other storage medium right now, dollar per gig wise, very few people would, would probably build a system today just because the cost of doing it on SSD, even for backup is just inordinate. I mean, hard drive data tape, you, we kind of had this tiers of data storage fast and really expensive while like the fastest and most expensive is actually your Ram, your random access memory, the tear down from that SSD really fast, but pretty darn expensive. Speaker 0 30:53 The tear of down from that hard drive pretty fast, not that expensive. And then below that you have data tape pretty cheap from the tape perspective. Once you actually have your foundational system put in place, but the data access to it is, is not immediate now actually that the speed of data tape is getting much, much better, but there is still a latency involved in like getting to the actual file. It's not just immediately present. We'll get more into the kind of accessing the data on a data tape archive in the media asset management episode Merrill just a little bit more because media asset management really can tie into a well engineered data tape based archives. Call that episode just the facts. Ma'am, ma'am just the facts. Ma'am that was all Maryland. There's, there's a whole level of Meryl talking to them. There's a whole level of energy, blah, blah, blah, blah. Speaker 0 31:49 It's okay. Let's just move on. So we'll get more into the, you know, the, the, the media asset management as a meaningful front end to your archive system and, and that's a whole other subject, but you know, we hope we've been able to communicate some of the complexities of engineering and disaster recovery backup, how it's differentiated from a longterm archival system, you know, where your data goes to retire. Um, there's a, there's a Florida, probably not good given the amount of hurricanes and flooding there. That's true. It's why we send our old people there, but the buffets at four 30 on a seafood. So we talked about archive versus backup. We know the associated mediums to, to both of those, um, uh, avenues. Uh, we've, we've sort of Speaker 1 32:40 Explained the semantic difference between the two of them operationally. The difference between the two of them. Uh, we've talked a little bit about, uh, you know, how they differ. Speaker 0 32:50 What are you building up to here? Speaker 1 32:51 Well, I'm curious, what, what are some of the other X factors? I know, you know, like for example, on the archive side LCFS, what's that? Speaker 0 32:59 Oh, so, so remember I was talking about kind of like for longterm archive, you have to choose formats of your data and not just choosing a physical medium on which it's stored. Well LTSS is not a data format for the actual media files, but LCFS you'll hear a lot about it's being bandied about, and it's a way of kind of mimicking the behavior of a hard drive on a data tape. So it, data tapes a lot different than a hard drive in that the files are literally linearly written out to a long spooled up tape of magnetic media. They are files, they're not turning back into wave forms or anything digital or analog. It's, it's a, it's this digital storage of files, but they get written in these long linear patterns of ones and zeros onto these data tapes and inherently that's kind of incompatible with just popping a tape in a drive and seeing a list of files pop up. Speaker 0 33:58 You need to have a little database that acts as an intermediary. So you can actually kind of see a catalog of which files got put on a particular tape. LTF S is a way that the kind of LTO Ultram consortium that defines the standards of LTO data type technology came up with two kind of, I guess I'll say standardize on the way in which the data can be written to an LTO tape and be presented more like files sitting on a drive. Right? And the problem is, is that it's not working super reliably amongst manufacturers. It's not quite ready for prime time data tape traditionally and throughout today has largely been written in a different file format. That's literally decades old called tar or a tar ball file. That's really what you probably want to continue to orient around. We'll put in the show notes, a great link that our friends at RQ were, um, put up on their own site. It's a great article about LCFS. Some of its challenges, archi where make a lot of the backup and archive software that we use and, um, read it. It's a great article and it gets into that. So Speaker 1 35:13 Where do we go from here? Obviously this has, this is a conversation that doesn't just involve the individual, a video editor, or even the, the, uh, the project manager or, you know, uh, the, the it component of, of your organization. This is a top down approach. I mean, you've got to have a continuity plan in place, Speaker 0 35:32 Gritty of your organization as a whole. If you're in the business of manipulating people's, this is a real important set of issues. And pretty much anybody who is using computers to do any level of work today is in that, I mean, this, we obviously are targeted towards, um, you know, the pro video sector, but at the same time, this, this applies for financial information. This applies for, uh, all sorts of, uh, data. You work at a, you know, a hospital medical data. I mean, this sort of stuff is, is no nos bounds. Uh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The nose nose, my nose nose. Yes, it does follow your nose. Uh, so I think it's important to think about this, not just as a very small and granular problem as it relates to your, your tapeless workflow, but understand that this is literally the difference between your business succeeding and failing in the result of a Castro. Speaker 0 36:27 Getting passionate about this man, turn up statistically, statistically companies that don't have, um, backup plans in place during a catastrophe. They are not able to continue operating as a company after the date of the catastrophic event, have something, especially if you're in the media business, really sit back and think about what are the two main things you've got. You've got your people who make up your organization, your creatives here, your producers, your storytellers, your editors, graphics people. And you've got the data that you're wrangling for your clients, the media, that you're the video that you're shooting. That's your deliverable. All of the equipment that you use to produce this stuff can be replaced. Replacing a computer is easy. Filing an insurance claim is relatively easy. You can't replace a person and you can't replace lost data. You have to make them the heart of your business and the continuity of your operations. Speaker 0 37:28 And by all means, as Merrill was kind of just ranting about passionately. Yeah. There's just, it's palpable. The passion. Don't wait for a bad thing to happen to learn this lesson, which many organizations do. Cause as you were just saying a lot of the time, it's a nonrecoverable kind of test, right. And you'll learn the lesson for your next lesson while you're filing for bankruptcy. And we don't want that for anybody. And on that note versus archive. Yeah. But, uh, but seriously folks, I think, uh, I think that about covers it. Um, we we've thought about a lot of scary things. Just, just have those happy thoughts of Godzilla and Mothra playing bridge in their iron mountain. I think they're having Superman over for dinner tonight. Hope they don't bring the kryptonite. I just saw Mothra standing over the stove going. I thought you said he likes kryptonite. All right. Um, next, next episode, we're talking about media asset management, just the facts. Ma'am just the facts. Ma'am and we'll, we'll get into both media asset management systems that are serving the actual production and post production process media asset management systems that can automate various aspects of your workflow, including delivery and transcoding of files. This stuff makes your life easier. So we'll talk to you next time. Take care. Bye.