With one good back up copy I used Norton Speed Disk, am I mad?

[Jules]

So on an 18 gig drive I was getting 'too fragmented' messages from PT" I had one copy drive and a week old DATA DAT DDS3 back up. I ran Speed Disc, it took a while but seems to have worked out.
Damn, seems like 3 drives are needed:

Main drive
Back Up drive
"Start again" Main drive

using 2 still gets you into fragmaentation problems...



Thoughts? Advice?



Jules

[snoopy]

Bootable CD with your utilities on it?

[Dead Space]

Jules,

How is it that using two drives and a tape backup still leaves you with fragmentation problems? Is there something special you want to save about the backup on your backup drive? In other words, why not just write over the backup with your current working version, wipe your work drive and copy back? I suppose you're just being careful.

On the other hand, a 20 GB ATA HD is about $150 US. We got one just for the purpose of temporary backup and "defragmenting" our main drives. It works great and we can even run the sessions off the backup if the track count isn't ridiculous. Come to think of it, that price for the ATA HD is from almost 2 years ago. I'd look into that if I were you.

[Jules]

"How is it that using two drives and a tape backup still leaves you with fragmentation problems? I suppose you're just being careful."

I dunno, with a week old data dats, it gives me the creeps just having it all on one drive for even 10 mins...(month 4 of an album) That budget drive option sounds v cool, good tip...Thanks!


I need to get hip with Mezzo & it's incremental back up vibe.. I'm not v slick with Retrospect at the moment...

I need to get good at this, it's a constant nagging worry and probably good for growing an ulcer!

Jules

[This message has been edited by Jules (edited March 20, 2001).]

[Bryan]

Jules,

Many are very happy with Retrospect, but I love Mezzo...it is very easy to use. Also, you can tell mezzo to make a copy of each tape so you have an ongoing backup of your backup.

Bryan

[stefan.]

We are using one 60gb drive and are backing up everything to DVD with the help of retrospect. Runs perfectly!!
One could also split the drive up in parts (is the english word partitions??) and then optimize one part at the time, we havn´t though.
Stefan
Tambourine studios

[swablar]

I use an extra ATA drive and Firewire for temporary back ups. Both work great.
Outside of partitioning, another way to help prevent hard drive fragmentation is to utilize the "Limit Record allcoation" preference... especially on drives 18 gigs or larger.
This pref limits the amount of space Pro Tools looks for each record enabled track, therefore, the files tend to remain more "consolidated" from the get go.

[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).]

[snoopy]

Speaking of speed disk, there are several options for optimization. Anyone have any recomendations on the best choice? (I forget them offhand)

[Jules]

Thanks again guys! All good advice... That record limit pref sounds v cool... Due to fade files becoming huge on opening some sessions, I get v close to the edge of 'full up' on my main drive all of a sudden...
As it is I have to re bounce some 18 tracks of live strings that got 'lost' on such a 'full up' problem... Thank god for the DDS3 tape, I managed to miss the error and threw away the other copy on the back up hard drive... I will do a seach first though, perhaps it's in some temporary 'crash' folder buried somewhere...

thanks again all...

I'm all 'hot swap' because i travel round, but there is no reason at my own studio I cant have one of these giant drives for back up operations.. Good idea...

Jules