Archiving Your Podcast

As you probably are beginning to realize, quite a bit of work goes into creating a video podcast. If you've got a FireWire setup, it can be pretty simple, but if you're using a video capture card and an analog camera, you may have to fiddle with your settings. Depending on how much editing you do (and how many cutaways you have to use), your final master may be quite a bit different from what you originally started off with. It's very important, therefore, that you archive your work so that you don't have to start from scratch if you decide to re-edit your podcast, perhaps for a "bestof" end-of-year show.

For that matter, your podcast may not be the only outlet for your programming. You may decide you want to put out a DVD or license your programming to a cable channel. The possibilities are all out there, but if all you keep lying around are the low-bit-rate podcast versions, you'd have to do lots of work to recreate your masters.

Save your work in as high a quality as you can. If you're working with a FireWire system, you can usually print your master right back to a DV tape. You can obviously keep a DV version on your hard drive if you've got space, but video files can fill up a hard drive quickly. DV tapes are compact and a fairly reliable backup method.

If you're not working with a FireWire system, or if you just want to keep pure digital copies lying around, consider buying an external hard drive (or two). You can use one to do all your capturing and editing and keep the other for archival purposes. Without the luxury of FireWire, you won't be able to save to DV, because video capture cards don't work in reverse; you can't print your edited master back to tape. You have to rely on digital storage.

One thing that hasn't been thoroughly established is how long hard drives will last. It's fairly common knowledge that hard drives in servers that are working 24 hours in a day have an average life expectancy of about three years. However, they're usually higher quality drives than most people have in their laptops or home desktop systems. Much like light bulbs, it's the turning on and turning off that are hardest on the drive.

If you're using external drives, you may not be using them every day, which in theory extends their life cycle, but if you put them on a shelf and forget about them, had drives have been known to "freeze." The data on the disc platters is intact, but the hard drive is unable to spin the platters to access the data. You can send drives in this condition to companies that specialize in data rescue, but the process is very expensive.

Unfortunately, we have no good answer as to how long hard drives are going to last. Institutions such as banks that rely on data use tape backup systems to maintain their data integrity. A number of pro-sumer tape backup formats are available nowadays. They're not cheap, but if you want a guarantee that your programs will be available 5, 10, or 25 years from now, you should consider investing in a good tape backup system, or open up an account with a backup company.