I would never trust an outside company to be responsible for my backups. Or even storage. It is looking, in fact, like I just lost the negative to a feature I made due to trusting the "complimentary vaulting" service of a lab. Web companies are an even more unstable venue.
I don't always have the discipline to follow this, but redundant digital backups, with one physical set offsite but under your control, seems the best bet. Check/renew on a 3 to 5 year cycle (definitely 3 if it's tape), and try to load / mount disk based backups a few times a year just to keep the moving parts remembering what they do. Hard for us no/low profit low/no staff shops, but we can try. There is an alternative: let it go. The Buddhist sand painting route. Make it, throw it out into the world, and delete your copy, forgetting you ever made it as you focus on the next piece. That one's easier for us solo folks, harder if you're a business answering to other people's money. Brook _______________________________________________________ Brook Hinton film/video/audio art www.brookhinton.com studio vlog/blog: www.brookhinton.com/temporalab
