Polimake and your hard drive
Almost nobody says it out loud: most of the world’s audiovisual material lives on external drives with handwritten labels. It works, it’s cheap and it’s yours, and we’re not here to take it away. Your drive stays where it is. What changes is that it stops being a closed drawer.
Your drive is not the problem
Saving to a drive is fine, and it will stay that way: it’s cheap, it’s yours and it doesn’t depend on anyone still existing in ten years. The drive does its job. What it can’t do is tell you what’s inside without you looking, clip by clip.
The cost is not the drive: it is not being able to look inside
To find something, you have to connect the drive, open folders and review clips one by one. Nobody does it, so you shoot something you already had. It happens every week and never appears on an invoice. The material is safe, yet it goes unused.
It doesn’t replace your drive. It makes it easy to use
Your copies stay where they are. What you add is a layer that reads what’s inside and connects it to where you work.
Index what you already have
Upload the drive as it is: files are described, transcribed and their metadata extracted. No reorganizing folders or renaming anything first.
Search without remembering anything
“The interview where they talk about the handmade process” finds the exact moment in the video, without remembering the date or filename.
And it connects to everything else
It stops sitting isolated in a drawer: share it by link, open it from your assistant and use it wherever you already work. The drive is still yours; now it’s connected too.
Originals untouched
Files come in at full quality and download exactly as they arrived. Indexing neither changes the file nor locks you in: you can take back everything you upload whenever you like. How a file comes in.
Show it without posting the drive
Links with your logo and an expiry date, with no account required for recipients. No more copying 200 GB just so a client can see three takes. Save and share.
Your drive becomes the backup
Which is exactly what it should always have been. There’s no need to choose between the two places: keeping your material in just one was never a good idea. Every file comes in understood.
Questions about archiving on drives
- Do I have to stop using hard drives?
- No, and we won’t ask you to. Keeping your own copies is good practice and you should keep doing it. What changes is the drive’s role: instead of being the only place the material exists—and the only way to search it, by hand—it becomes your backup of something you can also find and share.
- Then why upload anything if I already have it?
- So you can use it. What’s on the drive is safe but isolated: you can’t search it, share it without copying hundreds of gigabytes, or show it to your team. Uploading doesn’t take away your drive; it adds a layer that reads what’s 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?
- You’re buying different things, so this isn’t a per-gigabyte comparison. Another drive gives you more storage; this lets you use what you’ve already saved. If you’ve never reshot something you already had, you don’t need it.
Your drive stays. It just stops being a drawer
Upload one and ask it something you would have to look for by hand today.
