The queen of tidy Marie Kondo has a new Netflix series teaching us how to organise our pant drawers and say ‘thank you for your service’ to unused clutter then chuck it!
It’s a bit harder to do with digital-film data but if you are staring at a cupboard full of hard drives you want to ‘Kondo’ there are some simple rules you can follow.
• Label everything properly; drives, boxes, tapes and digital folders
• Have two identical digital copies of everything
• Store them in two separate locations
• Use two different formats; drive and LTO
• Using hard drives? Plug them in every 3 months to give them a spin
• Keep a precise database of what is where; backed up, backed up again and then again just in case.
Most vitally know how long you are contractually obliged to hold the data for. If it’s not written down somewhere then make sure your clients don’t assume you will keep it forever or worse for free. Oh yeah make sure at some point in the process you charge the costs of storage to your clients.
Obviously if you are too busy then you could use a data storage company who specialize in sorting, securing and and giving its clients real peace of mind. Happy New Pant Year from Film Locker!
