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If content is king, then back it up!

Posted: February 13, 2009 at 3:09 pm   /   by   /   comments (2)

hard_diskWe’ve all heard the saying “content is king” and the success of any digital signage business is dependent on what content is  displayed. In this particular post we won’t go into too much detail on how important content is… we all know that without content, a digital signage network becomes useless – not many people like watching a blank screen.  However, I decided to raise the question whether businesses have a system in place for backing up their content from their digital signage players.  Would you be able to reproduce the same content from scratch if you didn’t have a copy of the content somewhere?

I guess this is something businesses operating a digital signage network should think about. In the past, experiencing a hard-drive failure can be quite devasting and often quite expensive if you count the number of hours it would take to reproduce the same content. From the top of my head, I could only come up with several ways of backing up the content and these are:

1. Centralise and store the content onto a dedicated server with RAID configuration harddrives. In addition to this, have the files scheduled to be copied to an external storage such as a USB external HHD.
2. If you cannot afford a dedicated server, have the harddrives on the digital signage player set up in a RAID configuration – most operating systems are able to have this function but it will mean have at least two physical hard drives. Otherwise you could always copy the files onto an external medium (CD, DVD, Memory card, HHD, etc).
3. Have files distributed across multiple servers or across an external site (e.g. data center)


Have you ever lost your digital signage content due to a hard disk failure?


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For those techies out there, what is the best backup strategy?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

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Comments (2)

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  • September 1, 2009 at 9:20 pm DigitalSignageBlog

    It depends whether the digital SaaS platform has been designed with redundancy and external backups. Basically, the SaaS platform would reside on a dedicated server that hosts the application. So if there is no strategy in place for the hosting company to backup the content on an external site (i.e what happens if the building gets burnt down?), then you would loose all your content.

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  • September 1, 2009 at 7:57 pm Tara McCluskey

    In reference to your article on the subject of DS content back-up, isn’t a digital signage SaaS platform the answer?

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