FAQs

In house servers are ideal for working on your files, editing, sharing, creating !   They’re not ideal for long term preservation. Servers are susceptible to cyber attacks, along with natural or not so natural disasters in the workplace.

By all means, use your server for current work, but not as an Archive for your company’s legacy.

While everything is getting lighter and more mobile, this shouldn’t be the place to keep valuable company data.   External Hard Drives have a shelf life of 3-5 years, although this is primarily for drives read from and not written to.

Preferred Connection gives you the ability to store the Raw Data on LTO tapes, while still being able to access the lower online quality copies for selection, viewing, downloading and sharing.

We can’t knock it!  LTO storage is the most stable form of Long Term digital preservation of memory. But that comes with a cost, both financial and time. Maintaining an LTO system is an expensive endeavour to do it correctly. Maintenance and upgrades are constant. Due to LTO storage being our lifeblood, we are fully prepared to invest in state of the art machinery and constantly upgrade, so you don’t have to.

DAMs are a great place to store your content while you’re working on it. Better than  internal servers, they are ideal for collaborating with suppliers and clients from outside your workspace. They are however incredibly expensive for storing content long term. While some DAMs will offer a lower storage rate for files in “Deep” or “Cold” storage, the access to the files is limited and usually require a restore of the full project.   Preferred Connection will not limit your access to files, nor the ability to play, download and share your files, no matter how old they are, or how long they’re archived.

If your external creative or production partner is looking after your content and data, and doing a good job of it, that’s great.  What happens when they’re no longer your partner, or the team member looking after your account moves on?  We believe it is important for organisations to make an informed decision of how their content is maintained and managed.

Preferred Connection is ideal for managing access to your content  for all invested stakeholders.  This means your agency, production house, client anyone can access the content you value, for as long as you deem fit.

Similar to a DAM, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are excellent solutions for content that you need quickly and regularly but they are expensive. They have cost saving options such as Glacier which allows you to store large volumes of data for very little, however this comes at a high cost when you need to restore the data in deep storage.  

Preferred Connection allows you to view the files you have in storage, thus making it possible to restore the specific files as opposed to the whole project at an inflated rate.