backup regime

I have just acquired a second hand Apple mac pro which has been not previously been used for music (mainly photo applications). Specifications are :

 

Processor Type: Intel Xeon Quad Core Release Year: 2009

Processor Speed: 2 GHz Release Month: March

Processor Configuration: 2x 2.26Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Memory: 32GB

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.7, Lion Hard Drive Capacity: 640 GB

 

The previous owner has installed 3 hard drives in a Raid configuration.

 

I will be using the machine exclusively to produce music using Logic Pro and Vienna Symphonic virtual instruments. The aim is to make the working environment as slick as possible without any latency problems. I am an experienced PC user but a novice on Mac. Please can you advise on the following:

 

1. O/S. I have heard that I might get improved performance by downgrading from Lion to Snow Leopard. Or would it be a good idea to reconfigure the machine from scratch anyway (with either O/S).

 

2. How many drives woukd be ideal? Is Raid recommended?

 

3. Recovery. I was intending to use Clone x software to clone the drives initially after installation

 

4. Backup. I was intending to use the “Save as copy” for each project I’m working on using version numbers to enable me to revert to a previous version if required. Would you recommend any additional backup regime (e.g. Time machine)?

 

Thank you for your help.

 

Jonathan Collins

The previous owner has installed 3 hard drives in a Raid configuration.

 

You don't need RAID for music production.

 

I will be using the machine exclusively to produce music using Logic Pro and Vienna Symphonic virtual instruments. The aim is to make the working environment as slick as possible without any latency problems.

 

Latency is inevitable and unavoidable. The question is "how much" and the idea is to try and set Logic's buffer size to the smallest value that results in your computer playing back audio without glitches or artifacts. Buffer sizes range from 32 - 1024 samples. Start at 32 and work your way up. It's highly doubtful that you'll be able to run at 32, however. It's more likely that 64 or 128 will be the values you'll settle on.

 

1. O/S. I have heard that I might get improved performance by downgrading from Lion to Snow Leopard. Or would it be a good idea to reconfigure the machine from scratch anyway (with either O/S).

 

Based on the age of your Mac you should be able to downgrade to Snow Leopard. However, you might consider getting a brand new hard drive and doing a completely fresh system install on that. The idea would be to remove the RAID drives and install the new drive, install the OS on that, and then set the startup disk to be that new drive. Once you're up and running you can remove the previous system drive entirely, freeing up that bay for project and sample drives.

 

2. How many drives woukd be ideal? Is Raid recommended?

 

As above, RAID is not necessary (or desirable) for music systems. Recommendation:

 

• system drive = only for the system, installing apps, etc.

• project drive = dedicated drive for saving Logic projects (which includes audio you record on your system)

• one or more sample drives for installing your libraries on

 

Do not partition any of these drives.

 

4. Backup. I was intending to use the “Save as copy” for each project I’m working on using version numbers to enable me to revert to a previous version if required. Would you recommend any additional backup regime (e.g. Time machine)?

 

Time machine is brilliant. Get yourself a Voyager hard drive dock and several raw drives. After you've got your system up and running, back up your sample drives on separate HD's. Then use another drive as your regular backup for both the system and project drives.

Hi, firstly thank you very much for your helpful advice.

 

1. Snow Leopard quicker. I have picked up on this from fe firums. Do you have personal experience of Leopard being quicker than Lion for Logic Pro?

 

2. Voyager + raw drives. Will this be a better solution than Apple Time capsule (I read mixed reviews).

 

3. "However, you might consider getting a brand new hard drive and doing a completely fresh system install on that. The idea would be to remove the RAID drives and install the new drive, install the OS on that, and then set the startup disk to be that new drive". Since I already have 3 drives could I not just wipe them all and install OS from DVD onto 1 drive and then use the other 2 drives as per your recommendation? Are you suggesting that by getting a newer drive for OS I might get performance increase (If so are you thinking about SSD?)?

 

regards

Jonathan

Hi, sorry 1 further question!

 

Time Machine. On the basis that I will be saving verisions of projects as separate copies to external backup disk:

 

1. Will I get any additional benefit from running Time Machine?

 

2. Does Time machine run as a permanently resident task and if so might it have an impact on performance of Logic?

 

regards

Jonathan

I wouldn't waste any time whatsoever downgrading from Lion. About a million better things you could do to speed things up, albeit many would cost money. I would have Time Mach do the OS and run a backup regiment to an external storage drive for all your projects as you finalize them. You can never have too many sources of backups. I keep clones and networks backups of my drives. I don't want to rely on Time Mach for data plus it would spin resources too frequently if you back up too many things with TM.

1 system drive OS and apps

2 drives in RAID 0 (I believe, you want striping only, no redundancy - goal is READ SPEED) config for sample libraries. This data is very static and is in RAID config only to be able to push more data over the SATA bus than what a single drive can do on its own. I respectfully disagree with the earlier assertion that music systems don't benefit from RAID, They can and do, but only for this purpose.

1 very fast drive for audio tracks.

 

exactly the rig I have. 8 actual cores.16 if you count hypers too. With amount of RAM you have you'll want to run in 64-bit mode so that that memory is addressable by Logic and 64-bit plugs.

 

Am on Lion, no probs.

 

As for backups. I clone the startup disk nightly at 3 a.m. I have two QNAP NAS devices, and use CrashPlan to backup the startup, sample lib and audio data disks to CRashPlan running in the NAS. I ALSO back up snapshots of the current projects and important data via rsync to folders on the NAS that then back up from there to CrashPlan in the cloud. A bit of a Texas two step, but the MacPro is directly involved in backups for much less time this way (bottleneck is upload bit rate to the cloud. If something gets copied to the NAS, which is RAID 5 so one disk can fail without data loss, but that replica can trickle up to the cloud at its own pace. Will be going over to fibre soon, that'll help.

 

You can make a lot of music with the machine you have. Seriously....

 

Good luck and have fun!

Thank you very much for your advice.

 

My neighbour uses a Time Capsule controlled by Time machine software to perfom incremental backups and is clearly impressed with it. However he does not run Logic.

 

1. If I needed to restore a Logic Project to an earlier version that had been incrementally backed up by Time Machine would it be obvious which files to restore from the Time Capsule? If not it reduces the benefit of an incremental backup.

 

2. Will the Time Machine software have any noticeable effect on the performance of Logic Pro. I understand that you can set the interval for Time Machine to run or switch it off which if there are any performance issues would I imagine get around the problem

I used to love TimeMachine, but as long as I'm backing up this amount of data, TimeMachine and I have parted ways.

 

Look, it's a great, flexible piece of software, but... whether backing up to the QNAP NAS machines, or to a HD attached to an Apple Airport Extreme (latest version of hw and firmware), TimeMachine always reports that it did a check on the backup location and found inconsistencies, whereby, it has to rebuild the whole thing... startup disk is about 500GB, everything is nearly 3,6 TB. Don't have time for that to rebuild every two weeks...

 

As for how I deal with projects. I make a folder for the project in general, then do "save as" within that folder, creating a new subfolder per interim save. Probably once a day, or anytime there's a significant change made, I do a new "save as".

 

Current project is called "Crazy"

 

under Crazy,

 

I've got folders Crazy.1, Crazy.2, Crazy.3 ad nauseum... you get the idea. works fine.

 

I know that MainStage disables TimeMachine while in Perform mode, but I don't think Logic does this... so... disable while you're working on your project and turn back on when you're finished. I don't think the CPU hit is noticeable on our hw, but the disk I/O could theoretically get in the way of your audio and/or samples going to/from disk.

I am an experienced PC user but a novice on Mac.

 

With all due respect to the advice you received which is contrary to what I'd suggestioned... being that you're new to Mac, I would suggest keeping things reeeeeal simple and not bother with RAID. All you need are 7200 RPM internal drives per the configuration I suggested and you'll be up and running in no time. As far as Lion is concerned, the majority of my colleagues are running Snow Leopard and Logic 9.1.x (typically 9.1.3 - 9.1.5) and have very stable systems. On the other hand, there is a preponderance of posts here and elsewhere complaining of various incompatibilities with Logic and Lion.

 

So I'd suggest getting a handle on a basic system (per the configuration I suggested) and then, if your needs eventually dictate having more power (read speed or whatever RAID is supposed to offer an advantage for), that would be the time to investigate that kind of system IMO.

 

I run Time Machine in the background, incremental 1 hour backups of my system and project drive. No need to back up sample drives as part of a regular backup routine. Back them up onto separate after you've installed your libraries and update them only as you add more libraries to your collection. It does not negatively influence the performance of my system, and I run it hard.

before I seem too argumentative

 

1. Three drives? I should have caught this before suggesting RAID stripe set for the sample libraries volume. Won't work as one drive is for startup/apps, one is for sample libraries, the last for project data.

 

My bad.

 

2. The OP didn't say, but these MacPros were sometimes sold with hardware RAID cards in them. Somebody maxed out the RAM to 32GB, long before there was software support for this amount of RAM... so at some point, folks were perhaps thinking "large". The config that he bought, HW RAID or software (via Disk Utility)? If there's HW RAID card, and I don't know here so this is a question, are the three HDs currently connected to a RAID card or to the usual connectors on the motherboard?

 

3. Only RAID 0 stripe sets are of potential value for audio (playback only, as a 7200rpm HD won't use all of the available bandwidth on the SATA bus, actually only about 50%. The fact that I've got a stripe set volume is fully transparent to all apps, and as such, I've not had to look at this since setting it up. The stripe set is used *only* for sample libs (Kontakt, EWQLSO Platinum, all the Spectrasonics stuff and more).

 

4. OP was considering TimeMachine to a TimeCapsule, which is TimeMachine over a network as opposed to locally attached drives (a la the really cool Voyager hard drive dock). I can only share that this has proven problematic for me. For me, TimeCapsule = warning, although if backing to locally attached drives, works perfect, although I chose to clone my startup disk nightly as opposed to using it as TimeMachine target. In my case, it's not functionally a backup, but a clone of the startup disk for fast recovery should the internal startup disk fail. Backups are handled by CrashPlan which also affords offsite backup (burglars might have the time to grab my backups too?)

 

5. Opinion on journaling on/off for the project data drive? Folks used to say it should be "off". I'm neutral on this.

 

That Voyager thing is cool - gonna buy one.

 

Good thread!

How do restore an earlier version of a Logic Pro PROJECT from Time capsule? Can I do this in 1 step from Time Machine or will I need to know all the related files and copy them 1 by 1?

you can arrange your projects so that all, or only project specific resources get saved in the folder where the project lives.

 

this is a personal workflow thing, but I treat the top level folder of a project, including everything underneath/in it, as a complete entity.

 

for me, and others may do and think differently, I would restore that folder and everything in it.

 

in my workflow however, I just open the previous "saved as"... so if I'm on version .6 of a project and it tanks, I just open the .5 version and move on from there. this means that I'm eating up a lot more disk space as all the audio tracks/bounces etc are duplicated per "dot-version", but it's just how I work and it avoids questions about "related files".

 

I'm curious what others do!

Bump on an old post...

 

Having personally upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, Snow Leopard is DEFINITELY a much smoother experience. However, the downside is that the further along you go, more apps / libraries / plugs will be geared towards ML with less support as time progresses. I'm willing to live with some of the quirks of ML as they're not affecting my workflow.

 

Based on the machine you have, I'd recommend Snow Leopard over Mountain Lion. Other things you can do to get the most out of your machine is max out the RAM for your machine. You'll need to see what your motherboard can accommodate. OWC is great for affordable RAM & drives.

 

RAID 0 will NOT improve performance for sample libraries. There are several threads on the technical aspects of why this is the case. You will see better performance by having your libraries spread out over multiple drives, than you will in RAID O. Not just what I've read, my personal experience having run both setups over the last year.

 

I would highly recommend getting Vienna Ensemble Pro and running Vienna server with Logic. I am running a TON of libraries with Vienna being the shell outside of Logic, and I'm basically using Logic as A MIDI player, with the odd library engaged. Takes time to set up, but WELL worth it in the end. Logic still has quirks when distributing processes over multiple cores... resulting in a single core spiking, which halt the software and returns the CPU overload message.

 

Here's how I would recommend setting up your system:

 

Drive 1: OS X & apps (WD Black Caviar or an SSD, and make sure that you have enough space to never come close to the 15-20% remaining point.

 

Drive 2: Projects / sessions / scratch drive.

 

Drive 3 & 4: Sample libraries spread out over the 2 drives. If your budget can afford it, get yourself a Highpoint RocketRaid Sata PCIe card, a Kingwin or Wiebetech external drive enclosure in a JBOD setup, and run your sample libraries over 4-5 drives externally. They don't have to be huge drives, because you're libraries will be spread over multiple drives.

 

If after a few years you find that things are starting to slow down a bit, buy yourself a Mac mini and dump a few libraries to that computer, and run Vienna server (each copy comes with 3 licences) on you mimi, and use it as an external synth.... all over CAT 5 or CAT 6 cable!!

 

As always, make sure EVERYTHING is backed up. Time Machine is great when it works... but I feel more secure having a cloned drive or incremental backup of everything I would Need to restore.... OS X drive, sample libraries, projects, up-to-date installers. You could use a drive doc for these, and slip OEM drives into it like the old 3.5" floppy disks

 

That's my recommendation. Take it, leave it... it's your system, and you gotta go with what's going to work for you.

 

Now, time to work!

All spot on, but you're suggesting JBOD *over* RAID 0.

 

What's the benefit of JBOD in this use case? I've simply never considered JBOD...

I believe it's because of multiple drive heads operating independently, not relying on a Raid controller to locate the corresponding info on each striped drive. When I have some time, I'll look up the tech resources that I gleaned this nugget from.

 

I was running my OS X & apps from an SSD, project drive on eSata, and raid 0 for my sample libraries over 2x 1TB drives, and since moving to multiple drives JBOD, I'm able to run my sessions at a lower buffer rate, and decreased overload msgs.

 

And that was before I integrated Vienna into my setup. Now, I'm running sessions at 64-128 buffer rate, NO CPU overload msgs (unless toggling between multiple screen sets with video opened), and core distribution within Logic AND outside Logic is balanced. Using Play, NI, LASS, Omni, and tons others that I wasn't able to use before. Also, 32-bit bridge: gone forever.

 

Needless to say, after 14 yrs of programming, waiting for the technology to catch up and work within my budget, I'm extremely happy!

Hmmm... Yeah, I'd be interested in seeing that.

 

Just my hunch and thoughts. JBOD buys nothing in this case, other than that these physical drives appear to be just one. There's probably a little overhead to that.

 

What I think could negatively affect the supposed benefits of RAID 0 is this. If I were streaming one contiguous file, RAID 0 would win, it's what it's for, but... With multiple libraries needing to be stream, simultaneously, heads might be moving so often (serving up multiple streams in support of multiple libs, each with their own streaming engine too"), that the benefit of striping gets offset/negated.

 

Each drive being it's own volume would the most straightforward with the least "trickery", but I'd have to test... Would cost me a day to setup, and then I'd probably try and get rid of head contention as much as possible be spreading various libraries over physical drives so that one would "fight less" with another.

 

Concept would be a little like the same as for very very large databases, indexes separate from data, separate from transaction logs...

 

All theory, and SSDS are obliterating all of these concerns anyway

 

In my case, the sample lib RAID 0 set actually does test quite a bit faster (for throughput) than standalone drive (same make/model/size), but that's the black magic speed test, and that's not the same as serving up EWQLSO, Trillian, multiple Omni, Ivory, Kontakt and more all at once. Run the same test on the SSDs on my rMBP and all I can do is laugh at (but still love) my MacPro.

 

Good to hear that that HighPoint card works for you. For eSATA, I've got Sonnet, but... for USB 3, I've got HighPoint's offering... Made purely as a USB interface for disks, but driver support is appalling for Mountain Lion... Fast, but negatively affects other aspects of the Mac.

 

I think you've gone the right way, Vienna for sure... I've def considered this. I just think that SSDs cause these systems to no longer be I/O bound, and we need better audio engines that can deal with multiple cores...

 

But in the mean time, we have so much power available to create, it's amazing....

 

Hadn't seen this thread in a while - above all else, real world trumps theoretical

Agreed, real world ALWAYS trumps theory

 

Perhaps JBOD was the wrong term to identify what I was referring to.... I meant having multiple drives, no RAID config, with each drive mounting. It means for more organizing & spreading the libraries out in an efficient manner... but great performance increase all around.

 

I'll go the SSD way when the drive sizes are much larger, and don't cost a kidney

 

Cheers,

Roy