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  #1  
Old 09-03-2003, 06:37 AM
mahjorbidet mahjorbidet is offline
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Default What to Backup PT sessions to?

Hi,

I'd like to know what people are using for backing up PT sessions on MacOS X. We've been using Retrospect and Mezzo for years, but new Mezzo 4 is buggy but I never tried the 4.5 for MacOs X, is it the same or it's better?

As far as Retrospect, we use it to backup everything else except PT Sessions, because we have to many harddrives and there would something like 280 different backup sets to keep things organised like we are use to in Mezzo.

Is there a new thing? A better software? Is Mezzo 4.5 bugless?

We have a DLT 7000 and Super DLT 1 for backups, plugged on a PowerMac G3 that we plan to upgrade.

Thanks
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  #2  
Old 09-03-2003, 12:06 PM
mahjorbidet mahjorbidet is offline
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Default Re: What to Backup PT sessions to?

bump any help? Someone? I'm getting lonely here...
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  #3  
Old 09-03-2003, 12:27 PM
travista00 travista00 is offline
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Default Re: What to Backup PT sessions to?

maybe i'm crazy and mark trombino sez i'm not backing up at all, but i use firewire drives. i syncronize files to multiple drives for daily, weekly and montlhly sets and sometimes have multiple sets of that. it's worked like a charm for many big-budget records, and i've never had any problems retrieving lost or damaged files and no ait hassles either.... syncronizing files means you don't copy over stuff you already have but simply copy the new files, so all your older stuff stays untouched and doesn't go away even if you've deleted them from your current session. "synk" is one such program for os x. at the end of the record project, i then burn cds and/or dvds of the sessions for long term archival. record labels seem to like cd/dvd and sometimes multitrack digital audio tape for their archival purposes. thanks, travis.
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  #4  
Old 09-03-2003, 06:42 PM
Bryan Cook Bryan Cook is offline
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Default Re: What to Backup PT sessions to?

i too use firewire drives - i backup several times a day so its kind of the only choice besides tape backup. never had any trouble with firewire backups, plenty of issues with tape backups...

during the project I use retrospect backup to "file" for incremental backups then at the end I do a mac OS drag&drop copy to avoid relying on software such as retrospect for the long term archival/retrival.

yeah i know firewire drives have moving parts and everything which makes them prone to failure but CDs and DVDs are just not big enough for bigger projects, especially those at high sample rates. i would sit there and swap multiple CDs or DVDs but no one wants to pay you for your time to do that. and it takes a lot of time. plus there is human error involved with that...
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  #5  
Old 09-03-2003, 06:50 PM
Natural Sound Natural Sound is offline
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Default Re: What to Backup PT sessions to?

With Hard Drive space becoming more affordable, we too have started to rethink how to record and archive media.
We've also started using firewire drives for both recording and as an archiving option. Larger capacity drives means that an entire project can fit on one drive. Without needing to use multiple drives for a project, archiving is as easy as drag and drop.- the G4 has been transfering our files at about a Gig / min. to the Firewire drives. DVD's also offer a very inexpensive home for our data as a 2nd safty backup. Mezzo's instability has lost us hundreds of hours over the years ,(4.5.x is still quite wobbley-at least for us- and I thank Steve for having all the patience in the Universe, but still.....) so with a little more organization on the front end, archiving has now become quite painless , quick and effective.

I am interested in the synchronising files option- can travista00 please provide more info.
__________________
Thomas Anthony
Natural Sound
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  #6  
Old 09-04-2003, 06:18 AM
David Schober David Schober is offline
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Default Re: What to Backup PT sessions to?

While backing up to firewire is certainly easy, I'd not recommend it! I don't know anyone who's not had a firewire drive at some point, fail. Personally, I like Mezzo as it knows what a ProTools session is and can grab all the needed date no matter what drive it's on. So far, 4.5 for OSX seems okay and a MUCH better version than 4.

There's an AES panel working on recommendations about backups that George Massenburg is a part of and at this time their recommendation is AIT (any version) and Retrospect. This is looking to be the present standard for the major record labels at this time. There are some labels that dictate what kind of backup is given to them and I don't blame them.

Tape is a pain, but it's much, much more reliable than firewire.
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  #7  
Old 09-04-2003, 06:21 AM
taylor4814 taylor4814 is offline
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Default Re: What to Backup PT sessions to?

With Retrospect, I've noticed that by default it is "compressing" the data as it backs up; is this a concern with PT sessions, especially the audio files?
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  #8  
Old 09-04-2003, 07:06 AM
mahjorbidet mahjorbidet is offline
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Default Re: What to Backup PT sessions to?

Thank you for your replies,

I've tried the Firewire backup already using retrospect. But it kinda didn't work for us. Thing is that we're doing Post-Production work on Commercials and sometimes films and we backup everyday everything. For big projects like films, the firewire/filesync method is good and using retrospect is perfect. But it gets complicated when we talk about spots. Because we need to be 100% sure we can go back in time, sometimes years, just to retreive something and do an edit, Firewire drives are no good for us. Even when then archiving on DVD's because we'd be burning probably 10 DVD's everyday. (we got 5 studios booked full time, with 2-3 different projects per day, using 22 SCSI removable *sneaker net* harddrives and 10 firewire drives)....

What I've been wondering, is how stable Mezzo 4.5 for OS X is. I tried Mezzo 4/4.1 when it came out and had to switch back to Mezzo 3.8. One of the drawbacks, was that you were never sure if the backup was ok, verified and error free... which is sillly.. then it would always want tapes to be inserted telling that some files were not verified, you put the tape, flag goes of, quit Mezzo and when launched again, it would ask for the same tape. At least Mezzo 3.8 is stable. The other reason is that we have a SuperDLT that is not compatible with Mezzo 3.8 but compatible with 4.5 and Retrospect.

As for TAYLOR 4814, I never had any problems, and we've been using it for years; but Hardware Compression is better than software compression.
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  #9  
Old 09-04-2003, 08:57 AM
travista00 travista00 is offline
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Default Re: What to Backup PT sessions to?

for syncronizing files, you can find info on a program called "synk" for mac os x at this address: http://www.decimus.net/synk/

hope this helps anyone interested.

travis.
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  #10  
Old 09-04-2003, 12:15 PM
Allan Speers Allan Speers is offline
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Default Re: What to Backup PT sessions to?

quote: "With Retrospect, I've noticed that by default it is "compressing" the data as it backs up; is this a concern with PT sessions, especially the audio files? "

Taylor,

Don't worry about this. Audio files are too big to be compressed, so the compression-mode will do nothing except perhaps slow things down just a little.

BTW, while I haven't used retrospect in many years, but it definitely used to allow you to de-select compression. Is this no longer the case?
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