today i'm going to share with you how we safely ship hard drives internationally
high-speed internet is an absolutely amazing thing and it allows us to send
massive video files across international borders in the blink of an eye, but sometimes it's just
not always feasible to send your files through google drive or dropbox or some other service like
this and you might find yourself in a situation where you need to mail a physical hard drive
to an editor or a client who's overseas. Now this might be because you're shooting in a country that
doesn't have high speed internet like the US or Japan. Maybe you're in a country like the Ukraine
or Uruguay or Australia, yes Australia! Thank you, number 60 on the list, good job Australia!
So sometimes you've just got to do what you've got to do and you've got to put a hard drive
in the mail so today i'm going to share with you a few tips on how
to get that hard drive there safely and minimize the risk of data loss
my first suggestion is to never send the only copy of your data always keep a backup of everything
as the sender and this might sound obvious but i have had clients in the past who have sent me
hard drives full of media from overseas and they sent the only copy that they had they didn't
keep a backup and what inevitably happened was some of those drives failed in transit and the
only option we had was very, very expensive data recovery so don't put yourself in that situation
always keep a backup copy so worst case scenario you can just ship another drive if you need to
now if you don't have terabytes and terabytes of data to send and you can afford it then ssd drives
are by far the best type of drive to ship your media on. That's because they have no moving parts
so they're much more resistant to being thrown around by your courier the downside is they are
much more expensive than traditional hard drives and they don't have as high capacity. Now if you
do opt for a traditional spinning hard drive then consider going with something that is designed to
take a little bit of a rough treatment something like these drives here from Lacie. These are the
Lacie rugged there are other brands out there that make this style of hard drive so if you're
going to go with shipping a traditional hard drive choose one like these now failing that you can use
regular old internal hard drives however they are much more susceptible to drive failure maybe you
have massive amounts of data to send over or maybe you're on a really tight budget these might be a
good fit for you now apparently this is what they did when Aquaman was shooting here on the
Gold Coast they just bought an absolute tonne of these hard drives they would send multiple
copies across multiple drives of everything back to the US and if a drive failed it didn't really
matter because they'd have three other hard drives arriving in the mail alongside it so it's a good
chance that at least one of the drives would survive and so you know if money is no object
then that is one way of doing it but if you're on a budget and you can only afford to send one copy
then packaging them up properly is the biggest consideration when shipping this style of drive.
Now you could just send your drives in their original cardboard box but that's kind of lame so
that's much better this is how I prefer to ship my hard drives, in a hard case like this one now
this is nothing special this is no pelican brand of hard case this is just one that i got from
a local hardware store down the road i think it cost me about 30 bucks and the good thing is this
size of case perfectly fits these Lacie rugged style drives but it also fits
internal drives as well you can see that sits nice and snug so you can just close them up
attach a shipping label and then I like to thread some zip ties through the holes here now if you're
really worried about security and the potential of someone busting this case open you can put a
small combination lock on one of these corner holes and I've done that in the past and just
emailed the code to the client and then if you're really, really, really worried
you can just wrap this thing up in more packing tape than you'd need to mummify a corpse. A quick
side note guys if you have problems with your foam inserts they're starting to look a bit
tattered they're starting to fall apart I found a brilliant solution for repairing that foam
you can check that one out in this video up here so there you have it guys this is how we ship
our media when for whatever reason a service like google drive or dropbox is just not viable and I
hope you found this useful and learned something today if you did make sure to give this video
a thumbs up to let me know and if you have any questions at all let me know down in the comments
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