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we are tired of buying more firewire drives to backup our clients stuff. Is anyone using a rental agreement with thier clients for drive space? It could be cheap but a good way to make a little $? Any ideas about the cost structure?

Why not archive to CD / DVD ? I've got over 4 years of clients on over 400 CD's. 2 or 3 years ago we switched to DVD. I'm now about 1/2 through with copying the old CD's to DVD.

I store everything in a safe and keep duplicates in a different location. It's all logged in a binder. Works great for my studio.

I don't charge clients at all for this as it's not expensive for me. Media prices are so low these days. Shameless plug follows....

Thanks Sam's Club.

<small>[ December 22, 2004, 11:21 PM: Message edited by: studio dog ]</small>

It should be implicit in your dealings with clients that until they pay you completely for your services, or fulfill all the conditions of some predetrmined agreement on paper, you own the tracks stored on your hard drive. When you're done with the project, archive it to DVD or CD, hand it to them and then you can either keep the tracks on your drive or archive them to CD/DVD for your own purposes. In my experience, clients and artists tend to "lose" or ruin the DVD's and CD's you give them quite a bit of the time, and it's in my best interest to keep projects archived somewhere, not only for the clients but for labels, publishers and other industry-types.

For these reasons, I consider it my responsibility to arcive things and I don't believe I should charge clients for it. If you're losing your shirt, just calculate a percentage of your general overhead on archiving and add that to the bill you submit to the client.

I've seen 250 GB maxtor 78000 rpm drives as cheap as $135- that will archive a lotta projects...

I also bought on e-bay a firewire enclosure for 2 ata drives- (about 80 bucs) so with one of those and 2 maxtors 250 GB you have a whooping 500 Gb for archival for a mere 350 bucs- the beautiful thing also is that you can keep the little firewire unit turn off until you need it for archival, no need to have those drives spinning needlessly all the time-

i don't know how large are your clients project but I've found my clients project to be anywheres around 15- 20 GB (or less, as little as 10 GB). this set up will give you anywhere from 25 to 50 back ups, thus coming out about $12 per project.
(Plus is a lot faster than burning DVD's)

Two redundant stacks of DVD's stored in two separate places will probably be more reliable than any magnetic media / hard drive and take up a lot less space.

When I worked at an analog studio we charged a rental fee for the 2" tape of $20, after the final mix, the tape was reused (only 4 times). The client could buy the tape for $80 and it would be archived for 2 years or turned over to the client.
I don't think I like the idea of taking responsibility for infinite storage.
What if the drive crashes?
Why not charge the client $40 per disk to burn a DVD backup and give them the disk?

Originally posted by Danny Crucial:
I don't think I like the idea of taking responsibility for infinite storage. What if the drive crashes?

I agree with that!

Also, I had some backups on CD-R that went south on me. Good thing someone else had them, too!