Three Days

Although we would love to be able to store all of everyone's files forever and ever, we just don't have the storage space to be able to handle it all. So we have a policy that we will store your files on our networked hard drive for up to 3 days. And if you come back during that time and work on them some more, we'll keep them for an additional 3 days. And so on. And so forth. Etc. Etc.

Until now, we've managed to be pretty liberal with this policy, deleting files only when we run out of space, and we've kept files for weeks, or even months past the promised 3 days. But recently we've seen an explosion in the use of Hi Definition video in the lab, which takes exponentially more room than plain old DV video. Anywhere from 40-50GB per hour, in fact, compared to the 13GB per hour for standard video. So our User Storage drive is filling up much faster these days, and we've been forced to start following our deletion policy much more strictly. (Today, for example, I deleted over 150 GB of files to make room for the people working in the lab.)

So if you're working on a project in the lab, be sure to come back every 2 or 3 days to work on it to avoid risking deletion. And please consider buying an external hard drive to store your project on. This gives you total control over your files, and you never need to fear that we'll delete them when you need them most. More on external drives in a future post, coming soon.