# Archiving in Smoke

Archiving in Smoke saves your media and project setups on external storage devices or in a filesystem. This frees up space for new projects. It is also a convenient way to store your projects offline in a fully restorable form.

A project archive includes all of a project's Media panel content, including the Media library.

Or you can archive individual clips from the Media panel.

## Choosing a Medium for Archiving

Choosing a medium or device for your archiving needs largely depends on your technical resources and overall needs. There are certain advantages and disadvantages to using each medium/device.

Flame can read and write archives from the following devices: file systems, VTRs, and tape drives.

Smoke can read and write archives from filesystems. While Smoke can read VTR archives, it cannot write to them.

## Filesystem Archive

A filesystem archive is an archive stored on a hard disk drive, such as external USB/FireWire® (IEEE 1394) hard drives offers, or networked storage such as a SAN. The device can use any of the formats supported by your workstation, usually ext2 or ext3 for Linux, and HFS+ for Mac. NTFS is not supported.

Using a filesystem to archive your material provides the quickest method of archiving and restoring your material, and offers full support for mixed-resolution projects.

## VTRs

NoteSmoke only reads VTR archives.

You can use a VTR to archive your material. However, they do have limitations. As a long-term archiving medium, VTR tapes are subject to physical deterioration and format obsolescence. Also, the following clips cannot be archived to a VTR:

- Clips with a colour depth higher than 10-bit
- Clips referencing media, either directly or through clip history, with a resolution that does not match that of the VTR

You can use the following VTRs for archiving your material in Smoke:

- Uncompressed SD VTRs such as D-1 or lightly compressed SD VTRs such as Digital Betacam
- Uncompressed HD VTRs or lightly compressed HD VTRs such as Sony HDCAM SR or Panasonic HD D5
- Compressed HD VTRs such as Sony HDCAM (using "HDCAM" rather than "VTR" as the archive device type)

#### Topics in this section

- Archiving a Project to a File-based Archive
- Restoring a Project from a File-based Archive
- Archiving Clips to a File-based Archive
- Restoring Material from a File-based Archive
- Tips for Organizing Archives
- About VTR Archives
- Archiving to Multiple Volumes
- Supplementing Archives with System Drive Backups
- Restoring Legacy Archives
- Deleting Content from an Archive
- MediaHub Reference: Browsing for Archives