Overview

Archiving consists of writing media and project setups to external storage devices or to a filesystem, to store projects offline but in a restorable format.

A project archive includes all of a project's Media panel content, including the Media library, and shared libraries, the Desktop, as well as all of a project's workspaces. Individual clips from the Media panel, and the project setups can be archived.

Archiving project media and setups does not protect the data on the system drive. System files can be backed up and restored. See Back up and restore a workstation setup.

To ensure data integrity and prevent archive corruption, you cannot delete entries from an archive.

Archive Media

File System Archive

A file system archive is an archive stored on a drive, such as external USB or FireWire drive, or storage such as a SAN. The device can use any of the formats supported by your workstation.

Data can be of any bit depth or resolution.

Tape Archives

Important: Starting with Flame Family 2023, tape archive creation is deprecated: you no longer can create or update a tape archive. Tape archive restoration is now in maintenance mode, and is no longer tested or qualified by Autodesk.

A tape archive is an archive written directly to a device such as an LTO tape device. Tape archives can only be restored to a Flame Family workstation and are unreadable by other applications. The procedure to restore a tape archive is similar to restoring a file archive.

Flame Family products only support tape devices for which the vendor confirms that:

The device driver is compliant with standard UNIX tape device calls.
The specific version of your operating system and kernel is supported.

The application file /opt/Autodesk/[version]/cfg/init.cfg contains examples of the ClipMgtDevice keyword to help set up the appropriate block size value for the tape device and define a text label to identify the device in the Archiving module. See the documentation from your archiving device vendor for guidelines on the actual block size to use.

Table of Contents 2020 Format

The format of the Table of Contents files (TOC) changed in Flame Family 2020.

In previous releases, a complete TOC was created at every archive session. This meant that an archive could end up with multiple table of contents: one TOC for every time someone opened the archive to add material to it.

In Flame 2020, the contents of /opt/Autodesk/archive is now organized into folders: one folder per archive that contains all the table of contents.

This new format means that there's now only one TOC per archive, no matter how many times you append material to it.

How are archives named in the /opt/Autodesk/archive folder:

Pre-Flame Family 2020: <archive name>_<date>_<time>
Flame Family 2020: <archive name>_<creation_timestamp>.d , a directory to store all the archive metadata, including the HTML TOC.

This change also means that the TOC of archives created before the 2020 version must be converted to the new format. This conversion happens automatically every time you enter the MediaHub Archives view.

The first time you open the Archives browser, it will appear empty. Your archives are intact! The tables of contents are being converted. Do a manual Refresh of MediaHub to update the browser as the archives are being processed. In fact, the original TOCs remain at /opt/Autodesk/archive and can still be opened by an earlier version of a Flame Family product.

Important: Only the table of contents is converted: the actual archive files are left alone. But if you append content to an existing, pre-2020 archive, that archive is converted to the 2020 format and is no longer available to pre-2020 applications: this has always been the case and is nothing new.

The conversion should take little time on Linux. If the archive library mounted through NFS or CIFS on macOS, the conversion can take longer . You can disable the automatic table of content conversion to make browsing old archives faster.

To skip automatically the table of content conversion:

Navigate to your Archive Library folder. The default is /opt/Autodesk/Archive.
As root, type the following command: touch /opt/Autodesk/archive/.check_ok

The presence of this file prevents the detection of archives that must migrate to the new format.

HTML Table of Contents

When creating an archive, you can also create an HTML Table of Content by enabling Generate TOC in the Archives browser.

Use this HTML TOC to visualize offline the contents of the archive, using a web browser instead of using a Flame Family application.

The HTML Table of Content is stored in /opt/Autodesk/archive/<archive name>_<timestamp>.d/<archive name>.html

Note: You can change the default folder location where the OTOC files are creates. Use Flame Setup and in the General tab, change the Table Of Content Location.

You can also use the flame_archive command line tool to create the HTML TOC. For more information, see Command Line Archive & Restore.