I have a folder for each album, and a folder for ideas in progress.  Any external artist would have a folder.
 
I don't use Years because honestly that would not help me find anything.  I wouldn't remember which year something was started.

I'm curious why you create partitions for the different genres instead of creating folders for different genres. Does it have anything to do with technical reasons like block size, or you just happen to prefer that kind of organization?

Really very sorry to hear your sad he's Bitflipper...

I'm sure your new rig will be great, but I'm sad at all the lost music and years of work.

I'll be hoping something really good is about to happen for you to counter balance this tragedy!

soens
It just helps to keep things simple and efficient for me & the computer. The HD is data exclusive to the DAW. It's like each category has it's own HD which makes the OS find things faster since windows likes to spread file bits all over the place. It also makes it easier for me to navigate through projects and defragging is more efficient. Defragging is almost never needed in this case. Also, should one partition go crappy-wappy I've not lost the whole shebang.
 
There's also a CACHE partition where global Audio Data & Picture Cache files reside. This makes it easier to clean & keeps the OS drive free of expanding clutter.

Thank you for the detailed response, that makes a lot of sense. This thread has been really helpful to me.

I actually put the OS on one drive or partion and the Documents folder on another. Same reasoning as for the DAW. I've just done it that way ever since I started building my own systems years ago.

soens

bitflipper
Thanks, Keni. Yeh, maybe those lotto investments are about to pay off.

Yikes! It's one thing when thieves break in and take yer money. But now yer jest givin' it to 'em.

I was just kidding. I never buy lottery tickets. I agree with Bill Nye's definition of the lottery as "a tax on people with bad math".
 
On a tangential but relevant topic, building a new DAW has given me the opportunity to re-think how I organize sample libraries. The obvious method would be by instrument category, e.g. strings, pianos and percussion. But what do you do with all the collections that don't fall neatly into any one category? Where does a glass marimba go, or a carillon? 

My first thoughts on enhanced startup screen:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Enhanced-start-page-in-development-what-do-you-feel-should-be-there-m3229584.aspx
 
And one could pickup some things from Cubase MediaBay, like rating of files(5 levels) which can be used as differentiating between which stage projects are in. Then you won't have to bother where on disk they are - more like setting a number of search paths where to look, and then ability to filter on category or just rating you gave it.
-embryo
-mixing
-mastering
-done
etc
Or any other way you feel like handling it.
 
They overworked it a bit in Cubase I think, difficult to grasp everything it can handle  but very flexible as such.
But something like a ProjectBay maybe in Sonar with similar abilites - maybe incorporated in startup screen - and some presets to quickly filter out what you want to see.
 
Depending on what I feel like working on a day,  to finalize a mix or just work on song embryos. To be able to categorize and filter out easily - yes, that one I didn't work on for a while.

I don't know how you guys manage it. After 2 or 3 albums, my hard drive is full.
 
So I move completed (Completed?!? Joy!!!) material to external hard drives.
 
I make 3 copies to hard drives from different manufacturers for added safety, and label them.
 
As storage technology advances, I aggregate old drives onto larger ones. .

I have always assumed that cwp files are using relative pointers (i.e., where the audio file sits relative to the cwp, e.g. one directory down, in the "Audio" folder). The Global Audio folder still exists for projects started with no name given (for that it is still "required" since there is no project folder (yet)), or where per project audio is not used. From an organizational perspective, per project is far easier to manage and find over global audio. Back in the old days, the global audio folder was a mess... not only was everything in there, but they all had cryptic names to them as well if you just let CW name them for you.
 
The system isn't going to perform quicker either way, that is solely dependant on the drive seek times and where data is located. Your OS drive is pulling data from all over the disk most of its life.

Badly lol. I have 3 hard drives, two back ups and an SSD drive for working off. All my back up drives use a year designate and the individual compositions are labelled accordingly. I'm in the process of creating a third portable backup as well, because 20 gig folders aren't practical for up-loading to the cloud.

Funny this thread has just been resurrected - today I set up a method of syncing my two main DAW pc's so my projects are available on both, as well as having a cloud backup.
 
Currently I've got 4 folders that are different from the standard Sonar ones:
E:\TEMPLATES
E:\SEQUENCE  [ contains old .wrk files as well as newer .cwp files ]
E:\PICTURE [picture cache]
E:\WAVEDATA  [ set as my global audio folder as my .wav file folder for older cwp files]
 
I've now got a new folder E:\Projects which has copies of these folders (using the batch files described later on)
 
What I did:
1. Set up an account with Mega.nz ('cos you get 50GB free)
2. Set MegaSync to sync the E:\Projects folder to/from the cloud
 
The reason for having a copy of the folders is so Mega doesn't try to sync my main WAVEDATA/SEQUENCE folders while Sonar is writing to them - this would be BAD, and no doubt crash Sonar.
 
I've got two batch files:
 
CopyToMega.bat
ROBOCOPY E:\SEQUENCE E:\Projects\SEQUENCE *.* /S /COPYALL /DCOPY:DAT
ROBOCOPY E:\PICTURE E:\Projects\PICTURE *.* /S /COPYALL /DCOPY:DAT
ROBOCOPY E:\TEMPLATES E:\Projects\TEMPLATES *.* /S /COPYALL /DCOPY:DAT
ROBOCOPY E:\WAVEDATA E:\Projects\WAVEDATA *.* /S /COPYALL /DCOPY:DAT
 
CopyFromMega.bat
ROBOCOPY E:\Projects\SEQUENCE E:\SEQUENCE *.* /S /COPYALL /DCOPY:DAT
ROBOCOPY E:\Projects\PICTURE E:\PICTURE *.* /S /COPYALL /DCOPY:DAT
ROBOCOPY E:\Projects\TEMPLATES E:\TEMPLATES *.* /S /COPYALL /DCOPY:DAT
ROBOCOPY E:\Projects\WAVEDATA E:\WAVEDATA *.* /S /COPYALL /DCOPY:DAT
 
The /COPYALL option ensures all file attributes are preserved (like Last Date Modified etc), and /DCOPY:DAT does the same for directories. The /S option just means copy all the subdirectories too.
 
I created shortcuts to these on my desktop, so I can run them as Administrator - this is needed in order for all the the above options to work.
 
Now when I start a session, I run CopyFromMega to get all my latest projects.
 
When I've finished, I run CopyToMega and my new material gets copied to the Projects folder and synced to the cloud.
 
Obviously the first run takes a while, but running the two sync batch files afterwards takes seconds.
 
M.