Finishing a feature film. Execs said they want to "vault" the raw footage. Anyone ever had experience with that? Vaulting the Raws would make sense for a film shot on film stock but digital? Anyone see a good reason to place hard drives full of the films raws in a vault?

Slightly off topic.

You want to store it somewhere that it will be safe from all manner of disasters, while at the same time protecting it from theft.

Some people (Gates' Corbis collection for example, and Sony's masters) store Masters and digital (and real) media in Iron Mountain to vault it off and protect it in a "safe" area.

Digital media is no different than traditional media. It being digital just means you're storing a drive, or tape, or something to store it on. Could you do it yourself as a film maker? Sure. But you're in the film business, not the digital storage business. You'd have to hire a lot of IT people, deal with disaster recovery, state of the art technology, possible hacks of your IP or just plain rot of physical media over time.

You have to judge risk vs. reward. How valuable is what you're storing? Home movies? Put in on a USB drive in a drawer. Put it on the cloud? Might get stolen. Copy it to a dozen drives and put them in a safety deposit box? Maybe, but there are various risks doing that too. Is this supposed to be secured and available? Offline and available in a few hours or days time? These are all things you'd have to consider with the media, and it all has to exist somewhere.

Cloud storage is not necessarily safe, as has been seen with just personal users storage getting hacked. You generally want more physical security than that, so you either outsource it to someone else, or you have to manage that yourself. It all comes down to worth and your risk tolerance. Leaving raw footage in your 120 degree in the summer car trunk isn't a good bet.

/r/Filmmakers Thread