Should I Backup Camera Cards?
Every time I come back from a shoot, I always archive the footage from my card to my hard drive, but then when I import into Final Cut X, it copies all of my original files and converts them into a folder called "Original Media" using filename (id).mov. Then, if I want to optimize the footage, FCX makes yet another copy of the footage. This is taking up a lot of space on my hard drive, and usually I just delete the FCX files once I’m done with the project, but now what happens when I want to work with those events again? Is there a way to reconnect the missing files with my original archived footage on my hard drive?
Is it worth it to continue making straight backups of my cards? Or should I just import to FCPX straight from the card and use the "Original Media" folder as my backup? Can I trash the transcoded ProRes 422 media files when I'm done editing the project, assuming I can recreate them if I ever revisit it?
Also, does anyone have better alternatives to backing up thier work other than Excluding all the "Render" and "Transcoded Media" folder from Time Machine manually? This is very annoying and time consuming.
In FCP 7 all of this was very easy, but that has unfortunately changed in this version. Any help is appreciated.
Kurtis
Mac Pro 8-core, 8TB storage, 12GB ram, Mac OS X (10.6.4)