access to "clip archived" property

[panisset]

When you look at clips in a clip library inside Flame, they have an "Archived" property which tells you if they have been archived already or not. I'm trying to use Wiretap to figure out what needs to be backed up on our machines (using backdraft): I can use some kind of timestamp (look for all clips newer than a certain date, see my previous post about that), but that's not necessarily all that accurate. Having access to the "archived" status of a clip would let me come up with the minimal list of libraries which the archivist needs to visit to back up all new material which has not been backed up yet.

[Anonymous]

Hi J-F,

In what way is the clip creation date not accurate? I would think this to be more reliable than an archive bit that can be changed. The creation date, on the other hand, is set for life.

Dan

[panisset]

I'm not saying that the clip creation date is inaccurate. What I'm trying to do is to write a small WT Python app that traverses all the hosts, projects and libraries on the network and tells me all the libraries that have had new content added to them since the last time they were archived. Without having access to the Archived status bit, I have to do something like store a timestamp of the last time I ran my script and find all clips created since that timestamp. But that can fail in a number of ways:

- clips could have been created between the beginning and the end of the run of my script
- there could be clock skew between the host where I run my program and some of my flames (I've only recently implemented ntp here)
- whoever is in charge of doing the backups based on this information might not have been able to back up a particular library in time

For all these reasons, I would really like to have access to the Archived bit: that way, I can tell for sure what has and has not been archived on a system, and produce an accurate report for the Backdraft operator.

Speaking of which, one thing that Conform loses with respect to "old school" backdraft is the ability to generate a script of Actions to be done, such as generating a list of libraries to be backed up. Of course, Python scripting inside the application would solve that problem, but that's for another discussion.

[Anonymous]

- clips could have been created between the beginning and the end of the run of my script

True, but the same can also be said for the archive bit. What you need is either a way to lock the ibrary, or to know if it has changed while you were traversing it. A last-modified timestamp on the clip blibrary would seem to me to solve this issue ... which hs been requested by many. 🙂

- there could be clock skew between the host where I run my program and some of my flames (I've only recently implemented ntp here)

So long as you're comparing apples to apples (i.e. storing and compring last modification times as retrieved on the remote server), then you should be fine ... unless they played with their own clock ... which is always possible. In that sense, an archve bit is necessary, albeit with the restriction I pointed out above, so it's not foolproof.

Preserving media integrity is trick stuff.

[panisset]

But the thing about the archive bit is that it is part of the clip library, and it gets set automatically by Discreet apps when something is archived. So if what I want to do is simply figure out what hasn't been archived yet, all I need to do is traverse all clips/libraries/projects and get a list of libraries which contain clips where the archive bit hasn't been set. I'm not trying to archive outside of Backdraft, so I'm not trying to change that bit, just have access to it.

And if the person in charge of the Backdraft archive misses something, or a new clip gets created in the meantime while I'm running my script, it doesn't really matter: the next time you run the script, it will flag that clip as not having been archived yet.

I remember that the "archived flag" was a long-standing request in Flame, before that people had no idea what had been archived or not.

Longer term, I would really like to see WireTap expose some API for full support of file archives (at least creating them). I would love to be able to create file-based archives from code executed from a cron job, and which inerfaces with a MuSQL database to keep track of what has been backed up when and where. It's a bit silly to have to spend time in front of the application GUI to perform a task which would be done more efficiently and accurately by a script.