Leave on or power down at night?

[Toe Jam]

This is my first post to the DUC, I have been reading for a few months now and have gotten some great advice from a lot of you. I have a few questions for you regarding our new systems.
We have 2 HD3 rooms running A/V option XL, on G4s with expansion chassises (sp? or is the Chassi?) and all of our storage is on a Avid Unity server. The Unity is left on all of the time and taken care of by the video guys upstairs, my question is, at night and on weekends should we shut down all of the Pro Tools hardware(192's, Sync I/O's etc...) or just the G4's? Do any of you leave everything on all of the time? What do you guys do?
Also do any of you out there on Unitys do any additional backup such as DVD-Rs or Tape Back up etc..?
Thanks for your time,
T.J.

[Richard Fairbanks]

Oh boy, this ought to raise a few voices! I used to leave everything on 24/7. In the days of big consoles and analog machines it was by far the best thing if you wanted reliability. Now, I'm not so sure! I think as the gear ages it may reach a point where the next power cycle will cause a failure, so in that sense leaving the gear on all the time can postpone such trouble. Personally, I have begun shutting off certain items at night, like the small consoles and nearly anything with flourescent or lcd displays, in order to preserve them. I am also shutting down the big heat generators, like the computers and some outboard gear. I have been doing this power cycle daily for at least five years on much of my gear. All of my Macs have been shut down every night for 7 years with no troubles. I used to leave the 888's and USD on all the time but I had supply failures in one USD and an 882/20, so now they and the HD hardware are shut down every night. A Yamaha 02R has been cycled for at least 7 years and it is operating perfectly. Every personal computer I've ever owned (for something like 15 years) has been powered up and down every day, with no failures of hardware. Maybe I am lucky. I'm still experimenting with this new policy. I'll let you know how things have worked out in another decade.

[spigots]

Nice first post, T.J.



Frank

Oh, and I'd trust Richard. He's dished out some great advice here!

[parak]

I'm with Richard here. I power down all computer gear every nite at work and at home. Have for years, no problems. Course my G5 just blew up today, but I'm pretty sure thats a design flaw. Something about hard drives and 192's and stuff just whirring away all night worries me. But then I also check 7 or 8 times that I unplugged my toaster before I leave home.

[georgia]

we leave everything up and running 24/7 in our facility. The rule is: if you are going to use a piece of gear within the next 48 hours, leave it on. Otherwise turn it off.

Exceptions:
Console, pwer amps, monitors ( both audio and computer video ), disk drives, some specific outboard gear : We leave on period.. I have disk drives that ( other than a maintenance requirement or the NYC blackout ) has been running for over 3 years. AD DA equipment and interfaces are left on all the time.

Computer system CPUs get power cycled everyday just 'cuase they seem to run better.

cheers
georgia

[Richard Fairbanks]

we leave everything up and running 24/7 in our facility. The rule is: if you are going to use a piece of gear within the next 48 hours, leave it on. Otherwise turn it off.

My version is, as I get closer to a job's finish I get more paranoid. In addition to daily backups, usually the last day or two I leave the gear on round the clock (which coincidentally is about as much as I am working) just so there is less chance of a failure. The last thing I want is to have my clients pile in for the final, only to enjoy downtime.

[philper]

AC power has become so much more expensive here that many studios in my area
now shut down most of the electronics @ night--not so much for the power they consume
but for the power used by the HVAC and ventilation systems to keep the gear cool.


Philip Perkins

[houser]

I asked the same question to our tech. and he says the only gear that really
needs to _not_ be shut down are old-school gear with circuits that creep out of
it's sockets if you power-cycle. older consoles and outboard I guess...
Other than that it's what people have said here...more a question of how much
you want to pay the powercompanies... ,-)
We have also kept everything but the CPUs on for many years with few problems.

I guess one final point is if you trust your cooling system in your CMR...
if you don't...leaving your gear on a can be very expensive..
FWIW, YMMV.

best regards
Janne A.

[feakerboo]

We also have a unity server and 6 PTHD5 systems. I am always in autobackup (duh) but I make sure that whenever I create new media that will live on the unity server, that it is backed up right away on another system, probably to a firewire drive then off that to a DVD. I also backup sessions to a desktop folder as I finish them, them make a CD of everything in that folder daily.

We were in the middle of mixing a major motion picture when we lost EVERYTHING that was on the unity server. Fortunately everything was backed up on a firewire drive so we fixed the unity problem that night and copied everything back over. No one knew! The way that the server works, if one drive dies, you lose everything on that partition. The Unity is GREAT as far as speed, as I said we have 6 PT systems, and 3 avid all hitting the same media no problem. We have had multiple systems running 100+ tracks and OMF video all a once off that same media. No way you can do that with anything else.

Now if it just worked with OSX.......

-brad