Advanced User Level Archival Tips?

[zodiacyborgx]

Hi world.

I recently began working for a small IPTV Company associated with a politician who will for now go unnamed. My problem is that I am looking for a solution to re-organizing their archived footage and information. However, this is going to be tricky because they have thousands of Final Cut Pro projects dating back over their last three years of existence.

Now, what I am trying to figure out is a way to take a virtual snapshot of the disk that would maintain a reference of where the files were before they get re-arranged, so when I have to reconnect everything that belongs with project files, I can successfully do so. So what I am trying to figure out is if there is a built in function of OSX that can index and catalogue just the 'reference' contents of a drive, i.e. a large virtual alias that I can refer to if I come across a project file that once had media available that is now missing because it was moved.

I hope I explained that well. Any thoughts?

 

[angelwatt]

It sounds like you want to clone the drive (though this will do more than just create a virtual listing), or at least some folders. For the entire drive, you can use a program called SuperDuper. A program that can clone the entire HD or just parts of it, look at CCC (free). If you want to get fancier and are not afraid of the command line, then look into the rsync command.

For a virtual listing, you can use the ls (that's a lowercase L) command for listing files in directories.

 

[GroovyLinuxGuy]

If you simply want to clone the drive try using the dd command from the terminal

dd if=/dev/disk1s2 of=/path/to/where/you/want/your/copy

You can get the "/dev/diskwhatever by typing mount in the terminal and looking at the volume name that you see on your desktop

Example: I have a 8 GB usb stick connected to my MBP that I want to backup to a file
dd if=/dev/disk1s2 of=/Users/bs/Desktop/usb_stick_backup.dd

You have to unmount (not eject) the drive that you want to clone:
sudo umount /dev/disk1s2


This will create a sector by sector (empty sectors as well) copy of the drive and you can either store it as an image file or clone to another disk

If disk space is a concern for storage try using clonezilla (does basically the same thing but it runs from a live disk, so you will have to reboot the machine that contains the disk of what you want to copy, but it doesn't copy over blank sectors. It has a few more options (creating images and storing across a network to a central server, and a good range of compression types)

Hope that helps. Hope that makes sense...still having morning coffee!

 

[misterredman]

Not sure I undesrtood the virtual alias idea, but maybe you are looking at something like this:

Those utilities will create a catalogue of the files found on different medias or location. The you can search the catalogue for the files you are looking for:

http://www.disktracker.com/

http://diskcatalogmaker.com/en/

 

[zodiacyborgx]

Redman,

Thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for. Something that could catalog my disks before I start organizing everything.

The issue we have now is we don't have enough TBs to store all our data, so we couldn't essentially possibly find the space to clone entire drives. I just want to re-arrange all our footage to isolate all the older footage on archival drives that we can put away and use four or five drives for current projects.