When is a project "backed up"

[aggiedogg]

Kinda new to the Pro tools and I'm struggling with understanding the whole "disk allocation" thing.
Just wondering if some one could do a chronological walk through of what wold be recognized as "proper" procefure for backing up projects. What the big studios are doing as far as handling clients files.
Disk space is at a premium for our rather small place and I'm getting somewhat of a crash course (and attempting to sort out a years worth of no houskeeping from the previous engineer) in the world of PTools.


The guy that was there before me would record all the tracks in one giant session, with the intent of cutting up the individual tunes later. Wouldn't this be asking for trouble with all the tunes sharing the same audio file names?
If some one could walk me through their typical scenario I'd really appreciate it . Please excuse the bonehead questions, the learning curve is feeling a little bit steep....

 

[Greg Malcangi]

Hi Craig,

I'm not sure how the commercial studios do it but many professional PT users use DDS3 or DDS4 (Data DAT) backup with a program like Mezzo Media. Mezzo Media is a backup program with an optional PT extention. The beauty of this is that you just drag and drop your session icon on to Mezzo Media and it goes off by itself and backs up all the files associated with that session, even if they are on different drives. It does this by actually reading the PT session file which of course contains all the file names and paths.

If you've got the cash a DLT is faster, you might also consider DVD if you have a DVD-RAM drive. A lot of the big studios used to use Exabyte but I'm not sure if that's still the case.

Greg