Video Backup and Archive: 3-2-1 and Tiering
Drives fail, clouds throttle, deletions happen. Video footage is uniquely unforgiving because reshooting costs far more than backing up.
The 3-2-1 rule as a floor
Keep 3 copies, on 2 different media, with 1 off-site. For footage: a working copy on your computer, a backup on an external drive, and a disaster copy in cloud storage or another location.
A single copy is no backup at all. The test: if your computer died right now, how long until all footage is recovered? If the answer is "never", you are running a deficit.
Hot and cold tiers
Split footage into two tiers. Hot tier: projects in progress, on fast local storage, instantly available. Cold tier: finished projects’ source material, moved to high-capacity drives or cloud, opened at most once a year.
Cold storage should optimize for cost and durability: mechanical drives win on cost per terabyte; cloud adds geographic safety. Note that cloud preview transcoding never touches your original, so the downloadable file is the real archive. After delivery, move sources from hot to cold and keep only finished outputs on the hot tier.
Archive codec: space versus longevity
Archive encoding balances two goals: compression efficiency and decodability years from now. HEVC/H.265 is the current sweet spot: same quality at 30-50% less size than H.264, with decoding support across modern systems. AV1 promises more but is still rolling out.
Avoid stacking lossy re-encodes on archive material. Convert once from the highest-quality version, then store. A slightly larger master beats a space-saving extra generation of loss every time.
Naming and verification
Archive names must be self-explanatory out of context: date, project, camera, index, like 2026-09-17_product_A-cam_003. Keep camera original numbers at the end so files can be traced back to cards. Organize by project with raw, edit and output subfolders.
After archiving, spot-check: play random files, confirm durations and parameters. Check cold drive health annually via SMART data. Backups exist so that when a drive fails, you still have a copy, but only if the copy is healthy.