Footage backup
Also known as: backup copy, second copy
A second independent copy of material on separate hardware, so that a dead drive or a card cleared too early is an inconvenience.
Updated
What it means
A backup is a copy that fails separately. Two files on the same disk are one copy, and the distinction only becomes obvious the first time a drive stops being recognised by anything.
The useful version has three parts. The working copy, a second copy on different hardware, and ideally a third somewhere else entirely, which is the arrangement every professional eventually arrives at.
Action footage is unusually exposed to the problem. A Memory card gets reused within days, the volume discourages keeping everything, and nobody has ever reshot a session that only happened once.
How it works in practice
The second copy belongs before the card is cleared. A Card offload that produced one copy is a session with a single point of failure, and formatting the card removes the only redundancy there was.
Different hardware matters more than different software. An External drive and a NAS fail for unrelated reasons, where two folders on one disk share every reason a disk can fail.
Automating it is what makes it survive. A copy that happens because somebody remembered is a copy that stops happening in about a month, and a scheduled sync does not forget.
What to watch out for
Mirrored disks are not a backup. Redundancy inside one box survives a drive failure and not a deletion, a corrupted write or the box itself, which is why the off-site copy exists.
Synchronisation propagates mistakes. A deletion on the working copy reaches the other copy within moments, so a sync and a backup are genuinely different arrangements rather than two words for one.
Nobody tests restoring. A backup nobody has read from is an assumption rather than a copy, and a Checksum mismatch check on one file occasionally is the whole of the verification anybody needs.
How RawClip handles it
An upload is not a backup, since footage is read for the analysis rather than archived indefinitely. The original files stay the thing worth protecting, and a delivered result is small enough that keeping it alongside them changes nothing at all about the storage picture.