It's been a while since we've spoken about it, but hopefully you haven't waited until now to back up your material. I'm going to touch on some new ideas. But first let's make sure that everyone is being faithful about backing up your material. Did I mention backing up your material?

OK, OK, I'm repeating myself, but it's that important. Software locks up, hard drives fail, and heartache follows if you haven't saved lately.

I bought a DVD-RW not too long ago that has been great. No matter what size hard drive you have, sooner or later it's going to get full. Back-ups are essential. I use re-writable DVDs. They burn fast now, and I can back up at the end of a session date with no problems. On some projects, I make two backup discs, and store them in separate places (I live in Los Angeles, so an earthquake could take out the first one). Other states have different hazards. DVDs have come down in price enough to be practical to buy in quantity, so there's really no excuse not to back up. This is not purely data paranoia, these have saved my life (and other body parts), many times over on sessions; just the sense of security when working that a wrong turn doesn't mean the whole project is lost is invaluable. I had one drive that went to sleep, and never woke up again. I only lost a little of the session instead of the whole project which WAS on the drive as well.

So the object is to keep the drives clean in a data sense. How often are you defragmenting your drives?

This can slow your drive performance way down and cause other problems like data corruption, or missing files, "drive too slow" errors, and the like.

For those more new to this, let's imagine moving into a house, which represents the hard drive. A hard drive is not linear. It doesn't put everything from one song into one place although it may appear that way because you put all of your files for one song into one folder. But in fact, that data could be in many places on your hard drive, and has to quickly put it all together when you press play on the computer.

Back to the moving analogy. We start unloading the truck in no particular order. Some of the kitchen stuff goes into the kitchen, but some kitchen stuff goes into one of the bedrooms downstairs, some goes into the bedroom upstairs, some in the den and some in the garage. Now let's make dinner. It would be quite the process to find everything in all of these places and quickly make a meal wouldn't it? Defragmenting is like moving everything into the correct rooms: Kitchen stuff only in the kitchen, garage stuff in the garage, etc. Now when the whole house is in order, things are easier to find and to do. It's the same with a hard drive. Defragmentation software will put all of the files that belong together, next to each other for easy access. Programs like Tech Tool Pro, or Symantec products, and Disk Warrior are good for these things. Not only will they defragment the drive, but also fix errors in the directories, which is how the computer looks to find a file, and correct various other drive related problems. These software products can even perform hardware tests, to make sure that the data that gets written to the drive can be read by the drive.

As you can see, backing up is only part of the equation. How often should this be done? It depends on how much work you're doing. I never go past thirty days to take care of my drives, and I use them a lot. Some of my colleagues are more once a week types, but once a month is enough for me to find a "B" day where I can accomplish hard drive maintenance, and other normal studio downtime work. Things like repairing cables, cleaning pots and faders, dusting, labeling, changing batteries, strings, and general maintenance stuff.

Now for those of us that have iPods that you can also use as a hard drive, keep in mind that these need to get backed up as well. I also back up my iTunes libraries on there as well. Mostly just in case I lose or break it. That's 25GB of music and 5GB of pictures, contacts and calendars I don't want to buy again, sync, or re- import from CD!

Another use I've found for the iPod, is as a remote drive. There are small USB drives you can use as well to move files, but I have the 60GB iPod Photo, and will put ALL of the files for a song (or songs) on there if I need to go portable to another studio. So if that song folder is 4-8GB who cares? Bring all of the extra takes and alternate tracks with you. I can then hook it up by Firewire and bring them into a session at another studio. I've also even run the session right from my iPod, but I'm not sure I would suggest it as an audio drive. Thermally, trying to pull that much simultaneous info might be hard on the drive. This is also one of the reasons it's not suggested to use an iPod as a boot drive.

I wanted to just reiterate the importance of drive maintenance, because as we get more and more into larger drives, the propensity for a larger loss of data exists as well. Be good to them, and they will be good to you.

Take care,
Phil

makintrax@philgates.com
http://www.philgates.com