Archiving Finished Projects

G

gregoryg

New member
I just finished another album (“finished” as in it has gone off to be turned into tapes/CDs and it is up on Amazon/iTunes/Spotify…) and so today I finally moved the sessions off of my main hard drive to my archive this morning. This time around I saved all the DAW session, everything, the stems and source files, settings and notes… all of it, like 11GB. Last album I finished before this I was so sick of it and I figured I would never have to (want to) go back in, that I ended up blowing away everything and only archiving the final mixes [-3db headroom, 24-bit/96kHz, .wav] and the final masters (also in 24/96 .wav). Of course I immediately (and have ever since) felt weird about blowing away the sessions – EVEN KNOWING that I would probably never revisit them – which is probably why I saved so much of this more recent project.

Anyway, got me thinking about an album I worked on years ago that is still sitting in storage on ADAT Super VHS and another one on Quantegy 2” that lord knows will never see the light of day again – I mean come on, we aren’t talking about seminal albums here that are going to Super Deluxe remaster-packages any time soon!

I was wondering what some others on here do with their projects when they finish. Obviously if you are running a business perhaps there are archival requirements or delivery to a label and/or the artist… stuff written into the contract.

Anyone else save everything? Anyone else blow it all away? I will say it feels so flipping good to move finished projects OFF of my main drive, regardless of where they are going!
 
gregoryg said:
Anyone else save everything? Anyone else blow it all away? I will say it feels so flipping good to move finished projects OFF of my main drive, regardless of where they are going!
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I'm like you man. I feel some need to squirrel stuff away. Ironically I lost the only album session that I was ever likely to need again.
I actually spent tonight going through my sessions and deleted the unused recorded audio within in session to lighten them a bit.
That usually saves about 100-200mb per track..

There's always the possibility that someone might want to revisit their sessions or get copies without vocals or edited versions for publishing or something.
On top of that my memory is awful. I can actually look at 6 month old sessions and take 10 minutes to figure out why X is routed the way it is, or whatever. :facepalm: So, from that point of view, it's nice to open old sessions up once in a while and have a hoke.

Usually I pop completed sessions on a large 7200 disk to keep them out of the way.
Important ones also go on a portable 5400 usb drive.
My system drive is always a slightly smaller SSD with essentials-only on it.
 
I want to "LIKE" posts, such as Steenamaroo's there. Makes me think I am maybe not a hoarder after all.
 
gregoryg said:
I mean come on, we aren’t talking about seminal albums here that are going to Super Deluxe remaster-packages any time soon!

I was wondering what some others on here do with their projects when they finish.
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Yeah, true that. :D

Not that I expect my old stuff to ever need resurrection.... but I do have probably most of my tape mixes going back to the late 70s, and for some of them even the individual track tapes from back in my 4-track days.
Stuff I did during the 90's and early 2k's was on 16 track tape, and I do have all of that still.

I still use tape, so I save my multitrack tapes, but the real keeper/final tracks for all projects these days end up in file format, since all the tape gest dumped to DAW.
For that stuff, I keep both hard drive backups, and when I finish projects, I burn both the indiividual track fils, project files and final stereo mx files to DVDs for archiving.

It's just there...just the have for something...nothing....who knows.
I mean I have at times pulled out an old casette from the 80s to listen to a single trasck just because there was some thing on there that I wanted to revist or what have you....otherwise, at some point,

"I take it, I bury in the sand for a thousand years, and it becomes priceless!" :p

 
I wish I had saved things in the past.

One of my bands (the most successful one) broke up back in 1994 after a record deal fell through (label was sold while negotiating contract and tour support). 6 years ago the singer from that band/someone I considered my brother was murdered. Even America's Most Wanted picked up the case though did not actually air it. The story led to a re-release of the recordings we had done in 1992 as well as some reunion shows in his honor. Where were the master tracks? Could not be found... :(

I would have loved to get hold of those tracks now that I know what I do now. The snare sounded like shit. I could have fixed that! Evidently the studio owner recorded over them, as we did find the tapes with our name scratched off with Sharpie and new material from another band recorded on them.

I now save everything to a cloud service. $100 a year is worth it for me to keep my recent projects as well as archives for anyone who may have such an experience in their future.
 
In the nineties and onwards when storage was expensive and limited, I used to back up everything to CDs then delete them off my (then amazingly big) 20gb hard drive,

These days I don't delete anything. Everything gets back up to a NAS storage system. When those drives are full, I store them and replace with new ones.
 
jimmys69 said:
I wish I had saved things in the past.

One of my bands (the most successful one) broke up back in 1994 after a record deal fell through (label was sold while negotiating contract and tour support). 6 years ago the singer from that band/someone I considered my brother was murdered. Even America's Most Wanted picked up the case though did not actually air it. The story led to a re-release of the recordings we had done in 1992 as well as some reunion shows in his honor. Where were the master tracks? Could not be found... :(
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Not to make light of your real-life tragedy...but the thing with the missing tapes, kinda' like the whole "Eddie and the Cruisers" mystery. :)

jimmys69 said:
I now save everything to a cloud service. $100 a year is worth it for me to keep my recent projects as well as archives for anyone who may have such an experience in their future.
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That will certainly do.
Keeping a copy somewhere off-site is the absolute backup-backup.
You can have 20 copies in your studio...but what if something happens...theft, fire...meteor strike ;) ....your fucked.

I do a somewhat homemade version of that. I keep a another backup of all my archived and current stuff on a small Lacie rugged USB drive that is light and easily fits in my day gig computer bag. It's 500GB, so lots of room (they have 1TB versions too, same size)...so when I leave the house, the bag and/or drive almost always go with me.
If had paying clients, I would opt for a cloud back up service too....just to be sure.
 
miroslav said:
Not to make light of your real-life tragedy...but the thing with the missing tapes, kinda' like the whole "Eddie and the Cruisers" mystery. :)



That will certainly do.
Keeping a copy somewhere off-site is the absolute backup-backup.
You can have 20 copies in your studio...but what if something happens...theft, fire...meteor strike ;) ....your fucked.

I do a somewhat homemade version of that. I keep a another backup of all my archived and current stuff on a small Lacie rugged USB drive that is light and easily fits in my day gig computer bag. It's 500GB, so lots of room (they have 1TB versions too, same size)...so when I leave the house, the bag and/or drive almost always go with me.
If had paying clients, I would opt for a cloud back up service too....just to be sure.
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Yeah man. I had the worst possible scenario recently. I thought I was doing good by backing up my recording drive once a week to a drive that was never even running except for backup time. Maybe 300 hours use on it total. 560 GB used of 1TB.

Well, the main drive started clicking. I could not get data from it. Searched the web and tried some silly trick to freeze the drive for 4 hours. It actually spun free after but still couldn't get Windows to read the data. I had it out of the external case at this point and connected it directly to my mobo just in case the actual case circuit was an issue. Suddenly the thing made quite a loud 'ping' noise and jumped about a half inch across my Maschine controller.

I took it to a data recovery service (DataTech) and in 4 days they informed me that it would be around $3000 to possibly retrieve 10% of the data on the drive. Hell no! I have a backup drive. I would only lose the recordings I did on projects I was working on that week. No biggie.

Turn on the backup drive and I hear 'click,click click'. Sure enough, that drive was a catastrophic failure as well. 4 days apart from the other. Actually it could be considered the same day as it was powered down while I was awaiting retrieval from the other.

I got really drunk that night...

Carbonite or suffer is my opinion from now on.
 
jimmys69 said:
Yeah man. I had the worst possible scenario recently. I thought I was doing good by backing up my recording drive once a week to a drive that was never even running except for backup time. Maybe 300 hours use on it total. 560 GB used of 1TB.

Well, the main drive started clicking. I could not get data from it. Searched the web and tried some silly trick to freeze the drive for 4 hours. It actually spun free after but still couldn't get Windows to read the data. I had it out of the external case at this point and connected it directly to my mobo just in case the actual case circuit was an issue. Suddenly the thing made quite a loud 'ping' noise and jumped about a half inch across my Maschine controller.

I took it to a data recovery service (DataTech) and in 4 days they informed me that it would be around $3000 to possibly retrieve 10% of the data on the drive. Hell no! I have a backup drive. I would only lose the recordings I did on projects I was working on that week. No biggie.

Turn on the backup drive and I hear 'click,click click'. Sure enough, that drive was a catastrophic failure as well. 4 days apart from the other. Actually it could be considered the same day as it was powered down while I was awaiting retrieval from the other.

I got really drunk that night...

Carbonite or suffer is my opinion from now on.
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I've heard this story several times now but it still gives me the shits.....
 
I would never do it again because like for example there was entirely too much compression on the drums on the opening track (bummer first impression) of that one record I blew away the session files and damn do I wish I could go back in but deep down inside I know I never would bother: 1. I couldn't muster the energy because 2. I was so spent by the time that entire record want to mastering and 3. I convinced myself that I wanted to document where I was in my abilities at the time...

#3 is total BS because I hate that mix in reality but then there's #1 and #2!
 
Also I really tinkered with that one album I blew away and I knew that deleting the sessions and saving only the final mixes would be the only way I would truly be able to walk away from it. I honestly believe I would still be tinkering, at least plotting and planning to tinker, had I never mixed down and deleted! Heck, it felt good at the time, like I could finally proclaim: DONE.
 
I found the only way for me to move on was to have the completed mix professionally mastered. That way continuing to tinker would be a waste of money and expertise. Mind you I only do that with stuff good enough to master. I one mastered song redone though as I wanted to hear the differences between MEs.The differences are significant, subtle and, honestly, exciting.
I archive everything.
Last year a 2Tb external drive I bought 6 months prior died taking everything with it - sent it off for retreival but most of what came back was useless.
I then did some research into reliable storage formats.
SSdrives are OK but not for long it seems.
Standard HDD are similarly so so.
You need only check the warranty on those thing to find out just how limited a life they may have.
Currently, & I'd recommend you do your own research, CDs have the storage edge over DVDs and both are at the top of the list.
I had some disasters saving cakewalk bundles to CD a few years back - I think that was more to do with my old version of Cakewalk than anything else. I've yet to try it with Reaper to CD or DVD.
Tape seems to keep data fairly well but the amount and transfer times are problems - though they have invented some new tape back up system that is claimed to be better than everything else but not available to the public as yet.
Just at present I save a current project to the computer's drive, throw it on a largish thumbdrive and back up to an external 2Tb drive.
When I finish my current task I'll try CD & DVD again.
 
Since around 2000, I've been saving everything to CD-R. Usually one song, one to two CD's. So far so good. I've been able to go back into stuff that's 10+ years old.
 
Save everything seems to be the consensus, just a little variation in how to save it. I too lost a drive this year and a lot of stuff with it would be gone but I do double back ups. My technique is one desktop drive and one portable drive, 1TB-2TB, mirrored at all times. Total pain in the ass, but what are you gonna do? Too paranoid to have some stuff out on a cloud, so one drive gets stored in a fireproof safe.
 
Man, nothing I recorded in the 80s survived. Not one note anywhere I can find. Jump forward to 2000s. I had some of my material on a hard drive on one of my old systems. Had it backed up to another drive on the same system. Safe right? System PS smoked (surged) and took out both the drives....Now I keep things on externals, and copies on other networked systems. Not investing highly in outside yet. My stuff's important, but I'm not paying to protect it other than what's on the web, which is mostly undone stuff. Still writing, just slow at getting how to record down. Finish a few, start a few. That's the thought, just gotta finish one.
 
Multiple backups. I burn files to DVD-R, one backup hard drive, one backup solid state drive. If the house burns down ... I'm really going to be worried about my recordings? :eek:
 
Maxwell999 said:
My music sucks, so I don't even bother keeping the sessions and the files, just the finished songs in FLAC.
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Hopefully we can help you with whatever it is. Songwriting, lyric, tracking, mixing, or even self-confidence. We're pretty good at helping 'round these parts! :D
 
In a totally random and ironic turn of events, I took apart an old drive I had found yesterday that was giving me "device not recognized" errors and hand-jammed the USB connector into the side (accessable after snapping the plastic case off) and bingo bango the drive came back to life. Well what do you know... there was a folder on there containing all the session files from that album I thought I hadn't saved -- all 7.28GB worth -- fully accessable. So I grabbed them and now I have them back!

Lessons learned: Save everything because knowing that I don't have it just makes me want it more. Come up with a different strategy for closing out a never-ending project (i.e., different than getting to a stopping point and forcing myself to move on by deleting the sessions!).
 
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