Clipthesis Backup

Clipthesis Backup keeps a secure copy of your media in the cloud, so you can recover footage even if a drive fails or goes missing. It is content-addressed and deduplicated — identical clips are only ever stored once, no matter how many drives they live on.

Invite-only for now

Clipthesis Backup is currently invite-only. It is rolling out to a limited set of early-access accounts, so the backup controls described below appear once you are signed in and your account has been granted access. A future release will open it up more widely with full details on getting started.

Backing up a drive

1. Go to Drives
2. On the drive card, choose Back up to Clipthesis Backup
3. Watch the progress as Clipthesis checks what's already stored and uploads only what's new

Because backups are deduplicated, a second run of an unchanged drive uploads nothing — it just confirms everything is already safe.

The "backed up" indicator

Once a clip is stored in the cloud, Clipthesis marks it so you can tell at a glance what's protected:

• In the grid — a small cloud badge appears in the bottom-left corner of the clip's thumbnail.
• In the detail view — open a clip and look at the Locations section: a Backed up label appears in the header.

The indicator is content-based: if the same footage exists on several drives, every copy shows the badge once the content is backed up. The badge reads from a local cache first (so it's instant and works offline) and quietly reconciles with the server when you're online, so it stays accurate over time.

Download from Backup

You can pull specific clips back out of the cloud into any folder you choose. Unlike a full restore (below), this copies just the clips you select. When the folder is on a drive Clipthesis tracks, the clips are also indexed as a new location so Clipthesis keeps following them; pick a folder anywhere else and they're simply downloaded.

Download several clips at once

1. In the Library, select one or more clips. At least one must be backed up.
2. In the action bar at the bottom, click Download from Cloud (it appears when some of your selection is backed up).
3. The destination defaults to a Clipthesis Downloads folder on your last-used drive. Click Choose Folder… to pick any folder with the native file browser — on a tracked drive (the drive is detected from the folder, and the clips get indexed there) or anywhere else on your system.
4. Click Download and wait for it to finish. Progress shows the amount transferred (e.g. 1.2 GB of 7.0 GB).

Only backed-up clips are placed; anything in your selection that isn't in the cloud is skipped and reported in the summary. If a clip is already on the destination drive in a different folder, Clipthesis copies it straight into your chosen folder instead of re-downloading it from the cloud — fast, and no bandwidth used. A clip that's already in the chosen folder is skipped.

Download a single clip

1. Open a backed-up clip's detail view.
2. In the Locations section, click Download from Backup.
3. Pick the destination folder with Choose Folder… (or keep the default), then click Download.

After a download

Downloaded files keep their original filenames and are verified byte-for-byte as they arrive. When the destination is on a tracked drive, the clip gains a new location there as soon as the download completes — you'll see it appear in the clip's Locations without refreshing, and it behaves like any other copy (reveal in Finder, copy to a working drive, and so on). Files downloaded to a folder outside your tracked drives are placed but not added to a clip's locations.

Restoring a whole snapshot

If you need to rebuild an entire drive — for example onto a brand-new machine with no local library — use a full restore instead of per-clip downloads:

1. Go to Settings → Backup → Clipthesis Backup
2. Open the restore browser, pick a backed-up drive and a snapshot
3. Choose a destination folder and confirm

A full restore recreates the drive's folder structure exactly, and works even with no local catalog at all.

Backup vs. local database backup

Clipthesis Backup protects your media files in the cloud. It is different from Backup & Restore, which snapshots your local database (tags, collections, metadata) to disk. Use both for full protection: Clipthesis Backup for the footage, database backups for how you've organized it.