Back the f%@& up!

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"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."

- Murphy's Law

In Hollywood, you're only as good as your last project. In order for anyone to know how good you are, they have to see what you can do. Nobody will hire based on the work you tell them about, you have to back it up with examples. But it's really hard to show people your work if it disappears into the ether.

I had a really rough week. In case you hadn't noticed, I haven't been able to post anything in a couple months. I've been very busy working on a new web series, which it is also my intention to use as example in the Step-by-Step Guide. In about a week we’ll have our first round of test screenings for invited guests, get feedback, and plan to officially launch the series in early summer. If you’re interested, you can watch the development of the website (it’s not finished yet, but it is available online): chc.gigasightmedia.com. The series is a lampoon of US politics and media.

Regardless, the series has been in active production since December of 2009. The series is animated, so the entire series exists solely on the production computer. Audio is recorded to this PC, backgrounds are modeled, textured and animated on the PC. Characters are drawn on the PC. Elements are brought into After Effects and composited, animated and rendered on this PC. And the individual shots are brought into Premiere for final edit and export. All of it is on the hard drive, stored as ones and zeros. There is no camera, there is no film, the hard drive holds the originals, the edits, and everything else. In total, so far, the show is about 500 GB of data (first episode running time ~10 minutes at full 1080p HD).

I do have hard copies of the script. They exist on paper as well as on the hard drive. And, of course, we have the knowledge in our brains. Everything learned during tests, formatting decisions, stylistic and technological techniques are established.

On Saturday the PC informed me it could not find the OS. Something was very, very wrong.

Fortunately, because I plan ahead, the entire hard drive is mirrored onto a second drive, a safety backup for just this type of problem. The data is valuable; it represents months and months of work, time, and money.

That hard drive also would not boot.

As you can expect, this was cause for some concern. Instead of finalizing our rough-cut for screening, I’m trying to recover the lost data for the entire series. At this point, everything is gone. Not good.

What’s my point? BACK UP YOUR DATA. Back it up. Do it now. Back it up on-site, back it up off-site. Hard drives fail. Count on it, prepare for it. Double-redundancy is a minimum. You’ll never back up your claims if you don’t back up the data.

I was finally able to get the data off the drives and restore everything, but there’s nothing I can do about the entire two days delay this caused. That time is gone, and timing is everything. Not a total catastrophe, but a difficult weekend.

All’s well that ends well… almost.

Last night, my iPod died.