How to store your projects?

[chad kennith]

Okay, so I'm looking to buy a laptop that I would use to only record my music. Question, is a computers flash storage a big deal? 128mb, 500 mb, etc... Or can you save you project after your done with them to some external hardware, or usb flash drive? Thanks.

 

[Steve Fogal]

You can back up & save your projects to any storage medium generally. I now back up, by copying & pasting my projects to an external USB hard drive, as I make progress. I always leave my externals completely disconnected. If ever my audio/projects hard drive takes a dump, I always have everything I've ever done saved outside my machine(s) I never 'use' that external hard drive for my projects, it's just for a safe copy.

 

[gecko zzed]

I create, work with and save all my projects to an external hard drive. This drive is backed up by a NAS storage system.

 

[Mr Clean]

I have 2 1TB externals. One that is always connected that I work and save to and another for backing up. I've been bitten before by losing all my stuff, never again.

For the price of hard drives these days, it's not worth the risk.

 

[mjbphotos]

Yep, double back-up everything. You only have to lose all your work once (maybe twice if you're slow like me) to realize backing up is a very good idea!

 

[Steenamaroo]

Okay, so I'm looking to buy a laptop that I would use to only record my music. Question, is a computers flash storage a big deal? 128mb, 500 mb, etc...

Are you using flash as a generic term for hard drive, or are you looking at laptops with flash storage?
To answer the first half, the size of the built in hard drive or flash storage is a big deal.

All the advice about getting an external hard drive and backing up regularly is spot on, but make sure your laptop has enough built in space for your needs.

 

[chad kennith]

I was looking at a Macbook air with 4gb of ram and 128gb of flash storage. Would these be enough for music production? I wouldn't be recording a lot of instruments at once.

 

[Steenamaroo]

The airs are surprisingly capable machines.
As long as you're not planning on really heavy sessions with layers of virtual instruments and amp sims, you should be fine.

I imagine 128gb would be more than enough for humble home studio use, especially if you're going to backup finished sessions to an external drive.
If you were working with big sample libraries or video it might be a different story.

Okay, so I'm looking to buy a laptop that I would use to only record my music.

It's a mac....use it for everything else too.

 

[cecerre]

I use all SSD anymore given the price and stability of the particular brand I use. No more spinning disk for me. Long term backups are kept on a mirrored (RAID 1) pair, that's it.