GB Labs – From Shoot to Seamless Recovery: Rethinking Disaster Recovery and High Availability for Modern Media Workflows
Tim Harland, Product Specialist, GB Labs
In the world of media production, “high availability” means different things depending on who you ask. For post teams capturing hundreds of hours of footage at massive shoot ratios, or creative teams under tight delivery deadlines, storage downtime doesn’t just cause frustration—it halts progress.
The need for modern disaster recovery (DR) and high availability solutions has never been more urgent. Yet many teams are still relying on outdated infrastructure—systems built for static backup, not dynamic collaboration.
The Cost of Downtime
In today’s fast-paced media environments, downtime is expensive. When shared storage goes offline, timelines slip, talent waits, and delivery windows are missed. Losing access to project files, raw media, or critical metadata—even temporarily—can result in huge financial losses and damage client trust.
Traditional DR methods like LTO tape or offsite backup may prevent catastrophic data loss, but they rarely offer continuity. They’re built for retrieval, not workflow. And in post-production, that’s no longer enough.
Where Traditional Storage Falls Short
Media workflows are unique—they require high throughput, real-time access, and seamless collaboration across locations. Most legacy systems (SANs or traditional NAS) offer redundancy through hardware-based protections like RAID, mirrored drives, and dual PSUs. But these only guard against internal failures, not total system loss.
When a failure occurs—be it a power outage, hardware issue, or human error—teams scramble to re-route access. Even clustered systems, often sold as high availability solutions, can introduce new risks: complex rebuilds, performance bottlenecks and painful re-optimizations. These aren’t viable in modern media pipelines, especially when deadlines loom.
Rethinking Resilience for Media
Not all cloud storage is created equal. Generic cloud platforms—often built for enterprise IT or document management—may offer scale and redundancy, but they fall short when it comes to high-performance media workflows. Access delays, sync errors, and lack of true collaboration make them a poor fit for teams working with time-sensitive, high-resolution content.
Media-first cloud platforms take a different approach. They’re designed to support editing, collaboration, and asset management directly from the cloud—without needing to duplicate files or re-link projects. However, not all media clouds are created equal either. Many are geared toward small teams, carry hidden costs or struggle with performance under load.
This becomes especially apparent for power users—colorists, finishing artists, and VFX teams—who rely on sustained, high-throughput access to massive files like DPX, EXR, or RAW formats. In these cases, even media-aware clouds can become a bottleneck.
A New Standard: Built-in Resilience Through Hybrid Flexibility
Pure cloud isn’t always practical. File sizes, location-specific bandwidth, or team preferences often demand a hybrid approach. That doesn’t mean giving up the cloud—it means extending it.
Modern hybrid models let you deploy edge devices in remote studios or offices to act as local accelerators. These devices don’t host the data—they simply make it instantly accessible. Files are automatically cached as needed and remote users benefit from fast access without ever touching your core configuration.
More importantly, if a location experiences downtime or loses hardware, another user—or even the same user on another machine—can connect to the same files, in the same place, without interruption.
A good DR strategy for media should:
- Ensure your files are always available, regardless of hardware or location
- Maintain consistent file paths and access for users—no matter where they are
- Eliminate complex restores by keeping your live environment always active
- Support distributed teams: remote, hybrid, and on-prem
- Allow instant relocation—teams can move and resume work seamlessly
A New Model for Resilience
Modern media teams don’t just need a Plan B—they need a day-to-day workflow that’s resilient by default.
This means moving beyond static backups and archives toward an always-on, cloud-integrated workspace that supports real-time production. The ideal solution combines a globally accessible media filesystem with high-performance access—whether teams are working remotely, on set, or in centralized facilities.
Editors just want to work, so the system must deliver intelligent, automatic performance enhancements through flexible deployment models. Even bandwidth-constrained environments should support real-time editing of high-resolution formats. If a local device fails or a facility becomes inaccessible, users can continue working from another location or machine—without changing file paths, permissions, or configurations.
Security is integral to this model. Full traceability of user activity and safeguards for compromised users or devices should come built in. Adding new users or securely sharing selective file access with third parties must be straightforward without sacrificing control.
Unlike traditional DR frameworks, recovery isn’t reactive—it’s continuous. Every site, user, and deployment stays connected to the same authoritative data layer, maintaining consistency and operational continuity across the board.
For organizations seeking maximum resilience, this model should also support replication across multiple cloud vendors or geographically distributed instances, delivering true fault tolerance without added complexity.
It’s not just disaster recovery. It’s a smarter, more scalable way to work and its also the foundation that NebulaNAS was built on. NebulaNAS is GB Labs’ cloud storage solution that offers automatic, operational continuity for remote teams and workflows.
