World backup day is March 31st. Even though I’m writing this in July the topic seems relevant at any time and the sooner the better if you are not backing up already.

Stopmotion, or most animation productions for that matter, are very time consuming endeavors. Even though stopmotion productions involve real puppets and sets, a huge portion of the project assets live in the digital realm. A backup plan to maintain and restore hundreds of hours worth of footage and other production content is critical. I have been exploring backup scenarios and recently used gliffy to diagram a plan. I have also been exploring crashplan as an additional backup component during active productions where new footage and files are being created regularly.

Here is my gliffy backup plan diagram.

The plan contains redundancy to cover failures that might occur at various levels such as device, location and time. I also added the Vimeo example as a form of backup since it allows for the publishing of high definition content (although in a compressed form). There are other network attached storage solutions, external drives and RAID solutions that I may explore further. For example, something like drobo looks like it could take the place of individual USB drives in my diagram.