Well – I knew it had to happen, eventually. The DVD backups were becoming just *too* cumbersome for the amount of data I was archiving off every week. That, and a technical rub with getting an HD feature out the door for a screening on Friday left me with little choice but to upgrade one of my systems to include a Blu Ray disc burner.

One of the things that happens when data backups become too much of a hassle is that you tend to slide a bit on discipline in keeping a regular backup schedule. I have a nice big NAS drive attached to a Gigabit network – with a hands-free backup that writes new and changed files to an archive on that drive. No worries – right? Wrong. What if that NAS fails? Well, guess what – it happened to me a few months ago, and it likely cost me a project assignment in the process. So now it’s time to *grow up* and become really diligent about creating and managing backups like the rest of the adult world – and not rely on a major failure to tell me whether or not my data (and retention practices) are in good shape.

I could have gone with a dual-layer DVD burner, but for the difference in price for a BD burner it’s too easy of a decision to upgrade that part of my studio. Plus, my current project needed to find a place to burn a 1080p version of their film for a screening on Friday, and I had all of the software tools to burn the disc here (Sony’s DVD Architect 5.0). So now I get to add another chapter to the saga of this last-minute project – but in truth, this is something that’s been a long time in coming.

Once the dual-layer BD burners come down in price – I’ll put a burner on the *other* machine in my studio. For now, I’m happy to have this long-needed tool in my arsenal. It’s an incredibly important creative tool – if only for its ability to let me get a good night’s rest knowing that I’ve got up-to-date copies of all my projects in storage offline. The fact that I get to walk in to a screening room on Friday to show off my latest mix with video at 1080p resolution is just icing on the cake.