Best practices for archiving large sessions?

[Perrin]

Hi all

I'm going to need to archive terabytes of sessions, all of them just spoken voice with lots of edits.

I'm going to experiment with a hack where I have a script go through the Logic Session Folder (after I back it up!) and convert all the PCM to high-quality MP3 with the exact same filename, in the same locations. With luck, when I open the session, it'll ask me to locate the files, and I should be able to click Locate and it should relink them all. I have no idea if this will work.

Has anyone done anything similar, or has any advice for archiving files like this where there's a small chance I might need to come back later and make edits/additions?

[David Nahmani]

However small the chance that you might want to make edits in the future, don't convert PCM to mp3, that file format was conceived for distribution and really isn't suitable for production. 

If you need to downsize, I would recommend you clean up the projects, delete all unused files, and optimize files (can be done from the Project Audio Browser) to keep only what's necessary. That should be a more efficient way to downsize your project folders and getting them ready for backup. 

[des99]

I'll echo David's advice...

Also, a 20TB drive now is about $400... a couple of those mirrored should give you enough backup space for a while to store the optimised versions. If you're generating a lot of this data quickly and need more than that, you might want to invest in a NAS/RAID solution - basically a box of replaceable hard drives, to increase the amount of data you can store with some fallover redundancy.

Edited October 20, 2022 by des99