Polimake and your hard drive

Your drive is not the problem

Storing on a drive is fine and will stay fine: it is cheap, it is yours, and it does not depend on anyone still being in business in ten years. The drive does its job. The only thing it cannot do is tell you what is inside without you looking, clip by clip.

The cost is not the drive: it is not being able to look inside

Finding something means plugging it in, opening folders and going through clips one by one. Nobody does that, so things get reshot that already existed. It happens every week and it appears on no invoice. The material is safe and still goes unused.

It does not replace your drive. It makes it usable.

You keep your copies where they are. What gets added is a layer that reads what is inside and connects it to where you work.

  • Index what you already have

    Upload the drive exactly as it is and it gets described, transcribed and stripped for metadata. No reorganising folders or renaming anything first.

  • Search without remembering anything

    “The interview where he talks about doing it by hand” finds the exact moment inside the video, with no date and no filename to recall.

  • And it connects to everything else

    It stops sitting isolated in a drawer: share by link, open it from your assistant, use it from where you already work. The drive is still yours — now it is connected too.

Originals untouched

Stored at full quality and downloaded exactly as it went in. Indexing does not alter the file or lock you in: whatever you upload, you can take back whenever you want. How a file arrives.

Show it without posting the drive

Links carrying your logo, with an expiry date, and whoever receives one creates no account. No more copying 200 GB so a client can watch three shots. Store and share.

Your drive becomes the backup

Which is exactly what it should have been all along. Nothing forces a choice between the two: keeping material in only one place was never a good idea. Every file arrives understood.

Questions about archiving on drives

Do I have to stop using hard drives?
No, and we will not ask you to. Keeping your own copies is good practice and you should carry on doing it. What changes is the role of the drive: from the only place the material exists — and the only way to search it, by hand — to your backup of something you can also find and share.
So why upload anything if I already have it?
So you can use it. What is on the drive is safe but isolated: it cannot be searched, it cannot be shared without copying hundreds of gigabytes, and your team cannot see it. Uploading does not take the drive away — it adds a layer that reads what is inside and makes it available.
How long does indexing take?
Processing is asynchronous: you upload and it gets described and transcribed in the background without blocking your work. A large file is searchable shortly after upload, not days later.
Is it worth it compared to buying another drive?
It is not the same purchase, so the comparison is not per gigabyte. Another drive gives you more room to store; this gives you the ability to use what you already stored. If you have never reshot something you already had, you do not need it.

Your drive stays. It just stops being a drawer.

Upload one and ask it something you would otherwise search by hand.

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