One of the lowest moments I’ve had while making videos was at university, when I accidentally deleted the footage from an interview.

I did a journalism degree at the University of Winchester, and each week we had to create a news report for the TV bulletin we did on a Wednesday.

One week in third year, I found a brilliant story about plans for a new renewable power plant just outside the city. It had all the elements I needed: people loudly for and against it; local politicians speaking about the plans; and most importantly, the chance to film cows as it would be powered by methane.

With that in mind, I decided this was going to be my showreel piece – the one I submitted for my final grade on the module.

And it was all going to plan: I got the interviews; great quotes; and the filming looked great.

That is, it was all going to plan until I accidentally deleted the interview footage.

Let’s not get into the nitty gritty of how that happened, it was a completely honest mistake. But that completely honest mistake had me crying in the newsroom toilets at 9pm on a Monday night.

It’s easy to put it into perspective now, but it felt like the end of the world in that moment.

There’s no happy ending to the story – I didn’t get the footage back.

But it has put the fear of God into me with regards to video storage (which stresses me out but is great news for my clients!).

I have three backups of all my files. I’ve got my own NAS server at home in case any hard drives fail. Those two NAS drives are mirrored, so if one fails the footage is still on the other. The NAS drive is backed up to the cloud.

You don’t need to go to my levels while backing up your files. But you do need to have something in place, because it takes a lot of time and effort to make video content, so you don’t want to lose it.

 

 

To find what video storage solution would work for you, check out this Video Storage episode from VideoHQ’s Phone Filming Guide.

Because trust me, you don’t want to be crying in toilets. Someone from the year below walked in on me. Bit embarrassing really.