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Media Workflow Tip: Belt and Suspenders

October 30, 2017

Belt, suspenders, clean underwear, and a long-tail t-shirt just to make sure.

Previously, Ben had a good tip about how to extend the battery life of a GoPro job site camera, using a cordless tool battery and a USB cable.

"I took a Dremel tool, dremeled out the side of one of my cases, here, right where the charger port is. Nothing fancy.

Plug a charger cord in and then I picked up... We use Makita, so we picked up one of these USB power packs from Makita.

One of our 18-volt batteries clips right on here. Power out. And we get all the run time we need."

Here's another tip about file storage. Okay, roll the tape. Roll the tape. What? There's no tape?

When you get home with video or photo files on your camera, immediately dump the data onto a hard drive.

Don't record over the original media on your CF cards, either. When they're full, put them on the bookshelf and buy new cards. This way, you always have the original media as a backup, and you always have a new card to shoot on.

If your hard drive can automatically back up to the cloud, that's the best. Otherwise, do it by hand every time you dump files onto it.

When your hard drive is full, buy another one that's bigger than the previous one. Copy the past year's drive onto the new one, and that way, you'll always have current working files at your fingertips, and you'll create another layer of redundancy.

Now, you can archive the old drive safely on the bookshelf.

And here's another part of that tip about backing up your work. Don't wait until the old hard drive is almost full to get a replacement because if the new one crashes, you won't have any space on the old one to salvage original files that you've been working on that just crashed.

That would be like painting yourself into a corner.

—This tip comes from hard-earned experience on Professional Remodeler's 2017 Model Remodel

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