One fairly frequent question is whether a dropzone can use their existing network backup drive instead of a directly connected backup drive.

The answer is no. (But read on for options...)

The reason is that I have found network drives to be unreliable in practice. Too often, the computer loses the connection to the drive - and it's painful to figure out why and fix it.

If we're not able to move jumps onto the backup drive, then the edit computer can very quickly become full. If that happens, the whole system stops working until it can clear space.

So, for reliability - FFF requires a directly connected backup drive.

We recommend a standard (spinning disk) drive which is typically around $130 for 4tb. This will store about 2,000 jumps.

Network Backup - Backup!

What you can do is backup from the external drive to your NAS.
You can set this fairly easily to run incremental backups to a central point. You then have your raw footage on your NAS, and you can periodically delete older jumps from the connected backup drive.

This isn't something that the FFF app will do for you, but I'm happy to help you set it up using third party software.