Resolve Vault: A Backup Plan for Your Backup Plan

For those who don’t know the tool: Resolve Vault exports independent, timestamped backups of DaVinci Resolve projects. Colourist and Blackmagic Certified Trainer Hugo Soares developed the paid application to protect projects beyond Resolve’s built-in backup rotation. I

Resolve already rotates its automatic project backups, but that rotation has limits. In Soares’s tests, the defaults retained six ten-minute backups from the last hour, hourly copies for two hours and daily copies for two days. New backups can prune older copies, and deleting a project can also delete its associated automatic backups. Resolve Vault keeps its exports separate from that cycle.

Resolve Vault exports the open project every few minutes as a timestamped .drp file with a readable project name. Resolve’s own Project.db backups live in coded folders; a .drp can be identified by name and imported into a different Resolve project library. Vault retains exported copies until the user deletes them or enables optional retention limits. Nobody needs a game of find-the-GUID on deadline.

Back up the whole database

Resolve Vault also schedules backups of entire project databases, including local project libraries and network PostgreSQL databases. Soares notes that Resolve does not create per-project automatic backups during PostgreSQL multi-user collaboration. Vault calls PostgreSQL backup tools to generate an encrypted database backup in a single file, even when the job runs on a separate machine. Restoring that file creates a new database copy without overwriting the original.

Two clouds, one local copy

Vault can upload each new copy to Google Drive, Dropbox or both. A failed connection or a full cloud account does not remove the local backup; the history records the error. Its Google Drive access covers only files created by the application, while its Dropbox integration uses an application-specific folder. One failed destination need not take the local copy down with it.

Projects are not media backups

A .drp contains an exported DaVinci Resolve project. A project library or PostgreSQL database stores projects, not the original camera footage and other source media. Resolve Vault protects project data; teams must back up their footage separately. For a separate media-collection workflow, see our Resolve Collect article. The vault holds the map, but somebody still has to save the territory.

One caveat for active grading sessions: in a Lift Gamma Gain forum exchange, Hugo Soares confirms that automatic .drp exports temporarily freeze DaVinci Resolve. The export uses a blocking call in Resolve’s API, and the interruption can last longer on large projects. Scheduled database backups do not use that export call and do not cause the same freeze. PostgreSQL database backups can also run with Resolve closed, or from a separate machine with DaVinci Resolve Studio installed and access to the database. Frequent .drp exports therefore deserve a test with real project sizes before they run during a client session.

Resolve Vault separates named project exports and scheduled database copies from Resolve’s rotating project backups. Storage requirements will grow without retention limits, and teams should test a restore before relying on any backup routine. Restoring a project may be less glamorous than adding another grading node, but it has a much better ending.

https://resolvevault.app/