Cheshire Omnimedia

Here’s a quick look at what your backup directory should look like. Note the date convention: year, month, day.

Quick update: my LaCie doesn’t seem to have the same problem when I’m not using PT. I think it’s still a controller issue, but the drive might not be pwnd per se.

Looking around on the web reveals that more and more D2’s are starting to die en masse.  I’d still steer clear.

I suspect that Lacie’s QC or design team has gone the way of the Dodo. I’ve been fighting my Protools setup constantly today.

The culprit? I believe it’s the enclosure to one of my quadra 500 gig drives. During heavy use (such as batch exporting) the drive will “disappear.” Power’s still on (the Lacie support people will always blame this first. As if the power supply is the root of everything that can go wrong with their drives.)

Now I’m backed up (See this tip) so I’m not sweating bullets, but you do lose a few hours of productivity if a drive goes down.

My chain, for anyone who runs into this in the future: Dell E1705 ->Digi002R -> 500gig Lacie Quadra -> (Via FW800) 500gig Lacie Quadra.

My $.02: Avoid Lacie like the plague. A studio I work for lost one three weeks ago and then another started limping the other day. Combined with today’s experience, do yourself a favor. Skip Lacie all together.

Studio Moral of the Day: Backup everything, every day.

That’s what I do, and so far it hasn’t bit me. Note that in the previous post, we’re buying more hard drives for backing up projects. A best practice is to have the last few “versions” backed up, and to have that hard drive unmounted during session work.

Some audio applications will “look” into all the hard drives if they’re on- you don’t want that, hence unmounting the drive. You should have 2:1 backup space to project space, ie a Terabyte in backups for 500 gigs of storage.

At the end of the day, make a safety copy of the project, and label the safety directory with the date. You should keep a couple of “days” around to be safe. That’s for when you consolidate those drum takes and get rid of the source files- on accident. (Another day why that might “accidently” happen.)

So another day goes by. . . I’m sure many have this problem, especially starting out. Now that I’m here, what to say?

Perhaps I’ll just share a story.

A studio I work for was interested in buying a few new hard drives for backing projects up. We were looking at a terabyte drive. Comparing the three major brands that have them on the market was a bit disheartening on Newegg. All of them seem to have an alarming number of DOA’s or premature failures.

Now I’m completely hip to the fact the hard drives are a temporary thing. It’s in their nature. Tiny things are moving at stupifying speeds endlessly. Things break down. But shipping DOA? Every company had a review saying the three of six drives shipped failed, or other, similar problem.

Statistics 101 says I shouldn’t be too worried, as typically people who post are dissatisfied; people who are happy probably don’t. Actual DOA’s are probably a very scarce few.

Looking at the few, it makes it hard to make an informed decision. Seagate it is!