I've been helping a friend of mine, Justin Brunelle, with his latest big project. He's taking a trip across Canada, with his good friends Matt and Karla, for 150 days in celebration of Canada 150 Birthday. Highly recommend you check out a few of the adventure vlogs on the MILE30 Adventures YouTube Channel! Below I've added the most recent video at the time of writing this blog and one of my favourites; a tour below deck on the legendary ship Bluenose II!

Now that I've introduced you to the project you might be wondering what my roll in all of this is? I've been backing up all the projects and video files safely on a drive back in Edmonton. Let me also introduce to the Adventure RAID. This is a 16TB RAID5 (12TB usable) 1TB for each Provincie and Territory (except Nunavut got cut so there is 1TB extra.)

Now, let me walk you through the workflow. Justin has four 2TB hard drives. He starts and off working with one of the drives until he's ready to send the data off to me, from where ever he is on the trip. At that point, he will make a clone of that drive just in case the drive he sends to me doesn't make it back to me or come to me destroyed or doesn't function, you know shipping problems. From there he can start using the third drive to continue his work on the road. Should he not get a drive back from me before he's ready to send another he'll have one more drive to make a clone and send to me. Luckily, this hasn't been an issue, but he has enough drives to do a clone and around trip twice before he runs out. Once I receive the drive and know it works and all that good stuff. I begin to copy the data.

Now I don't just copy paste from the drive to RAID as that would be crazy! Windows or Mac have no way to verify that you get all the data when you do that. Instead, I'm using an open source copy program that checks the data as it copies to make sure you get every byte. It's FreeFileSync for those that want to use it. (Hedge for Mac is also great, but it's not free, and I'm on PC.) Justin has done me the courtesy of labelling his folders before sending them to me, so then I just make sure that each folder is going to the correct folder on the RAID and hit the synchronise button. Images below to help you see that.

The FreeFileSync program is on the left. On the right are some of the folders I'm going to copy.

Finally, when the copy is done, I open up the Premiere Pro Projects and make sure that they re-link to all the files and that nothing is reported as missing. If there is Premiere will tell me what is missing and where it was last seen. I can then relay that info back to Justin to send me on the next go around. I of course contact Justin to tell him I have all the data and where he would like me to send the drive to as he won't be in the same location that he sent it from.

And that is about all there is to it! I don't have pictures of me checking the Premiere projects because the files are still copying as I write this also I don't want to give spoilers on Justin's timeline you'll just have to check out his videos!