Richard Clark, post production support engineer at The Farm explains: “We have now implemented Marquis’ set and forget solution, Workspace Tools, to keep up-to-date copies of Avid ISIS workspaces on nearline storage. This acts as one of our disaster recovery solutions.

“Previously we would use synchronisation software to copy to nearline storage,” confirms Clark. “However, the challenge was that the software would take a very long time to scan the media files. It didn’t keep a database of the files and it also didn’t have as many features to automate the backups.

“We are now using Workspace Tools to back up the edit data for various time critical productions,” continues Clark. “These shows have tight deadlines, which means we need to keep a copy of the media files on separate storage, in a separate building, kept in sync with the Avid ISIS workspaces. These workspaces also need to be readily available should anything untoward happen to our Avid ISIS storage. Workspace Parking helps us keep an automatically synchronized copy on our nearline storage.

“The workflow is straight forward. When a new workspace is created, we add this to the schedule in Workspace Tools. The first time the workspace is scanned, all files are added to the Workspace Tools database and copied to the destination storage. Subsequent scans of the workspace are quick, because they compare the actual file size on the workspace against file size properties in the database. If they differ, then a copy of the file is initiated and only new files are copied. Checksums are also created during the copy to ensure data integrity.

“Another good feature of Workspace Tools is that it allows us to implement a slight delay in the synchronisation,” confirms Clark. “The deletion of files from nearline storage happens a few days after they have been removed from the ISIS Workspace. The amount of days can be modified depending on our needs. This gives us a grace period in case we need to retrieve any files.”

Clark concludes: “At the outset our requirement was simple. We needed a reliable solution that was able to integrate with our Avid ISIS environment and to offer us full automation. With Workspace Tools from Marquis we have achieved this.”