Long-Term Video Storage

What is long-term video storage?

Long-term video storage is the set of media, locations and costs you choose to keep video files safe and readable over years or decades. It covers where files physically live, how long that medium lasts, and what it costs to keep and retrieve them. The goal is simple: footage you need in 2035 should still open in 2035.

Why it matters

Video piles up fast. A single 4K shoot can generate a terabyte of camera originals, and a busy studio can add tens of terabytes a year. Storage that seemed cheap for one project becomes a real line item across hundreds of them. At the same time, every storage medium degrades or becomes obsolete eventually. Drives fail, connectors change, and cloud providers revise their pricing.

Getting long-term storage right means you can honor contract promises, reuse footage, and protect your portfolio without paying premium prices to keep everything on fast storage forever.

How it works

Long-term storage is a trade-off between cost per terabyte, lifespan, and how quickly you can get files back. The common options:

• External hard drives (HDD). Cheap and easy. Unpowered drives on a shelf can fail without warning, so they need to be spun up and checked periodically, and replaced every few years.

• SSDs. Fast and robust physically, but more expensive per terabyte and not ideal for long unpowered storage.

• NAS or RAID systems. Good for keeping a large library online in the office. RAID protects against a single drive failing, but not against fire, theft or accidental deletion.

• LTO tape. Common in post-production houses. Low cost per terabyte and a long rated shelf life, but it needs a dedicated drive and retrieval is slower.

• Cold cloud storage. Archive tiers from major cloud providers are cheap to hold data in, but retrieval can take hours and often carries fees for restoring or downloading data.

Whatever the medium, long-term storage benefits from a few habits: verify copies with checksums when you write them, record what is on each drive or tape, migrate data to newer media every several years, and keep at least one copy off-site.

Hot, warm and cold storage

A useful way to think about it is temperature. Hot storage, like your editing SSD or a synced Dropbox or Google Drive folder, is instant but expensive per terabyte. Warm storage, like a NAS, is reasonably quick and moderately priced. Cold storage, like tape or a cloud archive tier, is cheap to hold but slow and sometimes costly to retrieve. Most studios use a mix: current jobs hot, recent projects warm, older work cold. The right balance depends on how often past clients actually come back for files.

Is DLVRD meant for long-term video storage?

DLVRD is a delivery platform, so its role is the client-facing part of the lifecycle rather than decades of preservation. It keeps your original files untouched and lets clients stream or download them for as long as the gallery stays live, which is indefinitely unless you set an expiry date. For true long-term preservation, keep your own archive copies on media you control.