Offload Blackmagic BRAW from an SSD

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Blackmagic cameras record BRAW to an external SSD

The Blackmagic Pyxis and the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K / 6K Pro don't use a proprietary mag or a single CFexpress slot the way some cinema cameras do — they happily record BRAW to a bus-powered USB-C SSD hanging off the camera. It's cheap, fast, and means a 1 TB drive can hold a whole day. The catch: that record SSD is your footage. There's no second copy until you make one. Until that BRAW is copied and verified onto separate storage, a dropped drive, a corrupt write, or an accidental reformat takes the whole shoot with it.

So the job at wrap isn't "drag the folder in Finder." It's: copy every .braw file off the record SSD onto backup storage, prove it copied bit-for-bit, and only then reformat the SSD to shoot again. That's exactly what Copsy automates.

The "my T7 dropped frames" gotcha

If you came here because your camera flashed dropped frames or stopped recording mid-take, that's almost always the SSD, not the camera. BRAW writes a steady high-bitrate stream, and many bus-powered USB-C SSDs are fast in short bursts but throttle once their fast cache fills or the drive heats up. When the sustained write rate dips below what BRAW needs, the camera reports dropped frames.

The classic offender is the non-Shield Samsung T7 (and similar value SSDs): great for general use, but its sustained write can sag under a long BRAW take, especially at higher resolutions and frame rates. The T7 Shield and other sustained-write drives on Blackmagic's approved-media list hold up far better. The fix for next time is media choice plus formatting the drive correctly in-camera.

Be honest with yourself about what's recoverable. Copsy copies and verifies whatever the camera actually wrote — it does not fix, repair, or recover a recording that already dropped frames or stopped early. If a clip is short or glitched on the SSD, that happened during recording. What Copsy guarantees is that the good footage you do have makes it to backup intact, with proof.

How to offload BRAW from your record SSD

1. Stop, don't reformat. Power down the camera, pull the record SSD, and resist the urge to wipe it. Nothing gets reformatted until the copy is verified.
2. Plug the SSD into your Mac. Open Copsy — it detects the SSD by content and recognizes the Blackmagic BRAW footage on it as the source.
3. Pick destinations. Choose an external backup drive, plus optionally Google Drive or Dropbox (one cloud at a time) — copied in parallel during the same offload.
4. Let it copy and verify. Copsy copies the .braw files, organizes them by date and source, and verifies every file with ASC-MHL checksums.
5. Confirm, then reformat. When Copsy reports a clean verified copy (and pings you on Telegram), you have proof the footage is safe — now it's OK to reformat the SSD for the next card.

Choosing a record SSD (and a backup drive)

For the record side, pick an SSD with strong sustained write that's on Blackmagic's approved-media list — the T7 Shield, faster Samsung/SanDisk/OWC enclosures, and similar — and format it in-camera before the shoot. For the backup side, any reliable external SSD or HDD works; Copsy verifies the copy regardless of which drive you target, so the bottleneck is just transfer speed, not safety.

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