Archiving old projects

[rockysar]

Folks:

Time to archive some old projects which are inactive and taking up too much room on my primary work drive. I'd like to just copy them to DVDs for storage, but most are large enough that they will not fit on a single DVD disc.

 

I imagine that the Mac OS will take care of copying a single large Logic project folder across multiple DVD discs? Anyone had success with this?

 

-Rocky

Logic 9

MacPro 3,1

[David Nahmani]

I imagine that the Mac OS will take care of copying a single large Logic project folder across multiple DVD discs?

 

Not as far as I know.

 

Consider getting a hard drive for your backups. I did some backups on DVD once, and a few years later I couldn't even read the DVDs. I wouldn't consider using DVDs for archival.

[Wizozland]

I imagine that the Mac OS will take care of copying a single large Logic project folder across multiple DVD discs?

 

Not as far as I know.

 

Consider getting a hard drive for your backups. I did some backups on DVD once, and a few years later I couldn't even read the DVDs. I wouldn't consider using DVDs for archival.

 

I would actually extend that out to two hard drives, one for a completely seperate location.

 

Also, if you can, render all your tracks out as seperate wav files. This way, you can (within reason) have some sort of futureproofing.

 

so, get two drives, render all tracks, store one offsite. Probably the most you can do.

 

cheers

 

Wiz

[David Nahmani]

Also, if you can, render all your tracks out as seperate wav files. This way, you can (within reason) have some sort of futureproofing.

 

Agreed. Render every single track to audio before archiving. You never know where those synths/samplers/software instruments might be a few years from now when someone is asking you for an acapella or a radio edit etc...

[smorg777]

Same situation, but no DVD's, learned the hard way they're unreliable storage. My operating hard drive is full and I want to move a bunch of old project files to a separate partition folder on my Time machine.

 

Is there a quick easy way of drag & dropping a batch of these old files to the folder I want them in? I recently migrated to Mac from Windows, and am nervous about breaking links, etc. by using Finder like Windows Explorer. Same thing?

 

Alternatively, if I just delete all the old projects (makes me nervous to even say that!), will they still be available in Time Machine?

 

Thanks!

[n6smith]

Couldn't agree more with not using DVDs etc...

 

Apart from the issues noted above... I chuckle when i see higher priced CDs and DVDs advertised as "Archival" or "Guaranteed to last 25 years" or something else of that nature.. because by then, there won't be any working or reliable hardware to play them back on.... which renders the "Archival" bit.. moot!

 

Put them on a HD and then keep transferring them to whatever new forms of storage appear over the next few years...

[peeb]

I'm not entirely sure i agree about the benefits of archiving to a Hard Drive as opposed to archiving to a DVD or CD or Blue Ray. In my experience i've had both work and both fail. But you HAVE to do something so that aside, i couldn't agree more with the advice to render all your tracks as audio. The other step you might take if you are really concerned about being able to recreate your sessions in the future is to add Track Notes about what all the patches are and what instruments they came from. I recently had to open a VERY old session that had Kontakt 2 on a couple of the tracks. I don't even have that anymore. Kontakt 4 will of course open my older Kontakt 2 patches, but it would have been a HUGE help to me if i'd made a note of what the patches were. It all depends on how paranoid you are (i'm now very paranoid) and how much you want the sessions you save today to be editable in the distant future

[David Nahmani]

I'm not entirely sure i agree about the benefits of archiving to a Hard Drive as opposed to archiving to a DVD or CD or Blue Ray.

 

If that helps... you'll never see any professional recording studio archiving anything on a DVD or CD or Blue Ray. Trust me, HD fail too, but they are WAY more reliable that any of those supports. In fact you'll never see any computer company archiving anything on a DVD. Most of them archive on tape, but many archive on HDs. None archive on DVD, CD or Blue Ray.

 

I have seen HDs fail, and I have seen CDs and DVDs fail. However there is a HUGE difference.

 

First of all, I have seen a few HDs fail in my lifetime, but only a few, here and there, and for various unrelated reasons. One because the arm failed (and I was able to send it to a Data rescue company and get all my data back, albeit at the cost of over $1,000). One because I dropped it (no surprises there). Two external HDs (two different clients) because the box it was inside failed, but in both cases I was able to pull the HD from the boxes and get all the data back myself in a few minutes. A couple more for unexplained reasons.

 

However, I have archived a lot of material on DVDs. Maybe.... about 30 DVDs. A couple years later (2 years later, not more than that), ABSOLUTELY ALL the DVDs had failed. There was absolutely zero way to read them in none of the machines I tried, and data rescues companies cannot help with DVDs. ABSOLUTELY ALL the data was irremediably lost. Since there is no mechanical parts in a DVD, there's nothing to repair or to salvage. On a DVD, the sealing method, the quality of the reflective layer, the organic dye makeup, the manufacturing, and your storage practices all affect the durability of storage. DVDs take time to burn, they're fragile, slow to access, have a low capacity, and are just about guaranteed to fail within a few years.

 

HDs do fail, but usually not while sitting idle, unused, in a closet, for years. They're high capacity and fast, easily rewritable, making them easy to check, easy to transfer to and from, easy to carbon-copy, and ideally you should have your data on at least two separate HDs, or one HD and one cloud.

 

DVDs do fail, usually when sitting idle, unused, in a closet, for month/years. They're low capacity and slow, making them slow to check, a pain to transfer to and from, are not rewritable (I hope no one is seriously considering any form or rewritable optical media for archiving - those are even worse), and even if you had the same data on 30 different DVDs you would be just about guaranteed to end up losing your data after a few years.

 

Sorry peeb, but I just felt like I had to hammer that point home. I've been doing a lot of consulting for small to big studios, for unknown to celebrity producers, and on a few occasions I've seen producers lose month of work before my eyes. Not a pretty sight, not an experience I'd wish on any of you guys.

[peeb]

Nothing at all to apologise for David. The whole purpose of this Forum is for people to share their knowledge and experience. I shared mine, you shared yours

[ski]

Just want to chime in with a "+1" in terms of archiving to hard drive instead of DVD.

 

But... A backup is not a backup if you have only one copy! If you want assurance that your material is truly backed up, you need redundancy. This means backing your stuff up at least twice, if not three times, on individual HD's.

[s3m4nt]

The old adage is, "If your data doesn't exist in 2 separate physical locations – it doesn't exist at all!"