Every studio has one. A drawer, a box or a shelf of external hard drives. Some say "BACKUP", some say "OLD", most say nothing at all. Nobody knows what is on them, so nobody can throw them away.
In short
A drive in a drawer is not a backup. It is a single copy, getting older.
Hard drives can fail sitting still. The longer one sits, the less likely it is to start.
One afternoon sorts it: check, label, copy what matters, wipe the rest.
Why the drawer is a risk
There are two risks, and they pull in opposite directions.
The first is that something important lives on one of those drives and nowhere else: a finished project, a client's raw footage. Drives left unpowered for years do fail. The moving parts in older ones seize, and newer solid-state drives can slowly lose data when they are left without power.
The second is that the drawer holds things you should no longer have. Old client files, staff records, a full copy of somebody's laptop from 2017. A drive like that leaving the building in the wrong hands is a data breach with your name on it.
The afternoon sort
Plug in one at a time. Use a computer that is itself backed up. If a drive clicks, beeps or will not appear, stop and put it to one side. Every extra try makes it harder to recover.
Look, do not tidy. Open it and note what is there: which client, which years, how much. Do not start moving files yet.
Label it straight away. Masking tape and a marker. What it is, the years it covers, today's date.
Decide: keep, copy or wipe. Finished work you may need again gets copied to the shared drive or archive, where it is backed up. Copies of what is already on the shared drive get wiped. So does anything personal, or anything that belonged to people who have left.
Wiping properly
Dragging files to the Bin does not clear a drive. Erase it with Disk Utility on a Mac. For a drive that held anything sensitive, or one that has failed and cannot be erased, erasing is not enough: ask us and we will see that it is destroyed properly.
Stopping the drawer filling up again
One archive. Finished jobs go to one place, not to whichever drive is nearest.
Backed up somewhere else. Two copies in the same room is one burst pipe away from none.
Shuttle drives get emptied. A drive used to carry files back from a shoot is cleared once the job has landed.
Three, two, one. Three copies, on two kinds of storage, one of them off site.
Rather hand us the drawer?
We will go through it with you, recover what can be recovered, archive what matters and wipe the rest. Then we set up backup so there is no next drawer. Talk to us, or read about backup and disaster recovery.