external drives

[rtm]

I have a artist who finished an album and I would like to get all sessions of my drive(he also would like sessions).what is optimal way to do this and any suggestions on drives would be great.

[steve at Your Heaven]

I think the safest is to us "Save Session Copy In", and select all options (audio files, etc.) to on.

Another way is to just copy the folder using the OS, but this sometimes leaves some settings (eg, drive for audio setting) as still defaulted to the older dirve, which you then reset (or sometimes resets automatically).

Before doing either, set MAC/PC COMPATIBILITY to ON and save the session as such.

Any good 7200rpm (or faster) that has enough room and is not fragmented should do. Many drives are available as both USB2 and 1394/Firewire; while usually an extra $30 or so, it means you'll be able to at least copy the info to a new destination machine on almost any machine.

I have had very good results with Seagate and Western Digital drives.

[MDog]

I'm using two backup systems. For short term I copy all the sessions on to an external APS firewire drive. I tend to leave this drive powered off until it's time to backup. These are mainly sessions in progress and ones that I know will change as time goes on.

After the final mix, and I'm fairly sure there won't be further changes, I backup all the sessions on to DVD-R disks. I'll keep a copy in my archives and give the client a copy. That way there's always an offsite backup for them.

It works for me, but if you are having a high volume of clients it may be a bit labor intensive. OTOH, if you have that many clients you should get an intern to do the grunt work

Hope it helps.