This video is from Tyler Herrinton, a wedding filmmaker sharing his full editing and archiving setup for video projects. The system is designed to be reliable, cost-effective in the long term, and scale across years of footage. While it’s targeted at filmmakers, the general structure could apply to any media-heavy workflow. He focuses a lot on redundancy, and how to keep projects accessible without keeping everything live on fast storage.
Tools mentioned
- Western Digital MyBook → used as fast editing drives (in pairs)
- Drobo → RAID drive used as a mid-term archive for finished projects
- Bare desktop hard drives → long-term storage, used in duplicate
- Hard drive toaster → for reading bare drives
- Chronosync → software to automatically mirror one editing drive to another
- Backblaze (mentioned later) → added as a fail-safe cloud backup for all drives
Steps to follow
Import footage to Editing Drive 1, using a fixed folder structure:
Footage,Project,Audio,Effects & Stills,Export,PluralEyes
Use Chronosync to mirror Editing Drive 1 to Editing Drive 2 (daily or more)
When project is delivered, move the full project folder to Drobo
At end of the year, transfer everything from Drobo to two bare drives
Store one drive locally, and one offsite (e.g. a friend’s house)
Wipe Drobo and editing drives — ready for the next year’s work
Advice
- Use duplicate drives throughout the process: editing drives and archive drives both
- RAID drives are not fast enough for editing, but perfect for bulk storage
- Set up a simple but consistent folder structure inside every project
- The “toaster” setup lets you cheaply expand long-term storage without buying full enclosures
- Use a cloud service like Backblaze if you want an additional offsite backup
- Offloading footage once a year makes room for new projects without losing access to old ones
You can watch the full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzrnzjCQ4w8. Tyler’s system is focused on video production, but parts of it are useful for anyone archiving large media collections.