We got a panicked call from a video production client of ours last week. They desperately needed a clip from a video we produced for them three years ago.

Now, of course, we deliver masters to our clients. Lately we’ve delivered video files as WMV, four flavors of QuickTime, and FLV for the web, along with DigiBeta and HDCAM tapes for those old-fashioned types who like magnetic tape.

But they’d lost the master we gave them. They’d lost the disk with all the associated files, too.

Luckily for them, we had their master stored on one of our multi-terabyte backup appliances. Disaster averted, and we became Superheros to the client. And at no additional cost to them, no less!

It wasn’t always this way.

They say you learn the best lessons in life the hard way. That’s true of our hard-earned lesson in backing up our data. Before you get all holier-than-thou, understand that often the files we create for a client’s project are huge. Far too large for DVDs. Sometimes the master files alone are much bigger than a DVD can hold. So, you have to have a solid backup plan, and you have to budget for it.

We’d completed a two day shoot at a large Los Angeles based private college. The project was a video/DVD tour of the college campus, and we got a lot of great stuff. Well, we finished the production and handed our master and associated files to the client, as always, and stored a copy of the master on our RAID.

About a year later, the RAID failed. It was toast. Since the project wasn’t a “live” project, we didn’t have another copy of it. No biggie, we thought, since we’d completed the project and the client loved it so much they’d even paid us on time for it.

Then, the other shoe dropped. We got a panicked phonecall from the new college dean. They needed a new master, for a new DVD they were making for parents and students. Somehow, they’d lost their old one.

We narrowly averted disaster because we were able to recover enough “master quality” material from websites like Vimeo that let you upload HD quality video. Running these files through InstantHD in After Effects gave us a master that the college was happy with, and their project succeeded. But it cost time and money, and a lot of indigestion on our side.

Since that day, we’ve always done multiple backups of all our production Macs. This includes “digital negatives” of all of our RED One footage, too. It’s expensive. And time-consuming. We’ve had to build in a line item for all budgets that takes this into account. No backup system is perfect, but when there’s another client emergency we’ll hopefully be prepared.

Just like we were last week.