[BDWillis]

Hey Jules - I've been using DDS3 w/Mezzo for a couple years now w/o any troubles, and use Speed Disk every 2 -5 days to defrag drives… again, no troubles there.

One thought tho' — I don't use Mezzo as they say to, which is to drag the session document to Mezzo & let it keep track of everything across multiple drives, resulting in a CASCADING tape set for each project. Rather, I use one tape per 9gig drive (or partition), and drag the entire session folder for each song to the Mezzo window. If there are overdubs on a second drive, that drive gets its own tape (called # 2 of 2, for example). This cuts down on backup/restore times, as I can choose to back up only the drive w/new material at the end of the work day.

Also, I do a Master AND Safety DDS3: two tapes with identical content but "M" or "S" suffix, so in the event of mechanical failure I've still got a working tape (hasn't happened yet, knock wood…). Both get updated at the end of the day… Mezzo is great for this; simply looks for any new material in the session folder & backs that up, plus looks at the time of "last modified" on stuff it's already backed up… compares versions with what's in backup catalog, and archives anything that's been modified. And always set Mezzo to full verify; never set for hardware compression.

And in case of fire (what, me paranoid??!), the Master version lives at my house in a fire safe, while the Safety version lives at the studio in tape storage. Sorry for being long-winded…

Warmest Regards,
Brian

[This message has been edited by BDWillis (edited March 21, 2001).]