Edge offers you the possibility to securely back up your material 


In this article, we will show you how to back up your material safely, step by step.


Firstly, you can configure the backup volumes in your settings. This is optional, but be aware that if you don't configure this, you can only back up material to a folder. 


To configure these volumes, go to your System settings in Edge by clicking on the icon in the top right corner. Scroll down until you come to the 'Volumes' section. You can adjust the type by clicking on the arrow:

  • Source: is set as default. This can be selected as the source of a backup / import job.
  • Backup: can be used as a backup destination. Once this is chosen, it will also be recognised as a backup volume on other Edges.
  • Shared: can be used as an ingest destination (to write off transcoded material). Once this is chosen, it will also be recognised as a shared volume on other Edges.
  • System: is hidden in Edge and will not be shown as a source or destination option.




Now that we have this configured, we can start with the backup. You can read more about the whole process here. At one point, Edge will ask you to select a destination for backup, as seen below. 



The checkbox 'calculate a checksum' is checked by default. If you were to hit 'continue without backup' as shown in the screenshot above, this will calculate a checksum to save data on this clip in the Edge library. 


If you do select a destination, you will get a screen as shown below. 


'Verify written bytes' means that the checksum on the source files gets calculated and compared with what is being written. If for any reason an error occurs (for example because of a corrupt drive), it will be detected. 


Lastly, the 'import the clips into the Edge library' is best left checked. If you check off this box, your material will only be written to the destination but nothing will change in the Edge library. Meaning that the importing piece of 'import & backup' will not happen. 



Note that you can add multiple backup destination at once to do multiple backups at the same time. If you do that, Edge will read the material and simultaneously write to multiple backup destinations. The slowest destination will be determining the speed. 


What happens then is that the files of the source get written to the drive according to a certain structure, the 'path'. You can read in this article how to determine that path. 


Suppose you start a backup to the L:\ disk and you didn't change anything to the path configuration. Then Edge will create L:\Your Production Name\2021-04-01\Alexa1\Card001\ and write under this folder. The values 2021-04-01, Alexa1, Card001 are dependent on what is filled in in the metadata screen of the import.