Time machine, Backblaze affect Pro Tools performance?

[nedorama]

Backblaze is great and you can set it so that it only looks to back up at certain times - like when you're not in the studio. Mine's set for 11pm-7am. Other than that, non issue, confirmed looking in Activity Monitor.

[massivekerry]

Lots of good suggestions so far, but you also may want to change Pro Tools "Nice" value so that it takes more of the CPU resources.

The Terminal way to do it is described in this recent Pro Tools Expert article, but as it suggests at the bottom, you can just get CPU Setter, and change PT's value in the "Processes" window. That's what I do.

[GoButtonGuy]

Originally Posted by kirkbross

I ask because I used to have a 2008 Mac Pro which had fewer performance issues than my current, faster-on-paper Mac Mini, and I never had to turn off TimeMachine or Dropbox, though I didn't have Backblaze back then (that's a new thing).

I'm just at the point where I want to eliminate all the unnecessary background services to see if that helps.

Using the Mini for a general computer and a production Pro Tools rig can be a bit of a compromise depending on what you're doing. I've had a current Mini for a while now and even configured in a locked down config the Mini can have issues. I'd WAG it's video related as that's the choke point of the system not just for PT but anything else. I don't have any hard data to support that, just a hunch. That said there are a lot of folks here running systems on Minis with good results including post. You're going to have to decide to what level you want to compromise your daily use and what kind of performance/stability you need from your DAW.

As Darryl says what specific issues are you having? Anything running or interrupting during recording or playback can have an impact on the audio engine. Time Machine is fine for a small operator like you. Just turn off auto backups while you're using PT. It's slow as it's basically a data copy utility and it doesn't check the integrity of the backup drive but it's free and easy to use. I use that on my home, non production machine and several of the Macs at the gig.

Carbon Copy Cloner is good and cheap. If I needed to backup/archive paying content at home that's what I'd buy. On our purpose built Macs (ie. nothing other that what that machine's intended use might be) we clone both system and audio drives even if the system has a hot spare. We use Acronis for the Windoze boxes. With a clone you can boot it as a different drive and you're on you way then restore at your leisure. We schedule Retrospect across the internal network for incremental backups even if I'm also backing up something to Time Machine.

Go through the steps to optimize then see what impact the optimizations have on other things you need to do with your computer.

[kirkbross]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Yes absolutely. Just being loaded into Pro Tools, even if you are not using it can cause all sorts of issues. May pay to first suspect plugins you are using, but "unused" plugins are alive and able to do bad things.



Disk cache in Setup>Playback Engine. Set it to a few GB or whatever is needed to fully cache your session into memory. "normal" is effectively "off". Confirm the session is fully loaded by looking at the Disk Cache meter in Windows > System Usage (one of the few times you'll hear me suggest looking at meters ) .

Many thanks, sir.