How to archive projects to free up space

I prefer buying a external hard drive that connects with USB, easy to slide the entire song folder over. If that is not an option maybe a nice 4 gig thumb drive, same concept. On the cheap, just copy them to a CD disk and label them. One guy i knew, copied the song folder to a CD disk with a copy of the .dll files for any effects and instrument he used so if the system went down he could duplicate easily. Another thing to do is with an external drive, is to clone the main drive, so you can complete reinstall in minutes.

Actually, I do it all the time now. I have my c/w program on "c" drive, and the project files are on a "j" external drive that is running through a usb cable. I also use a "k" external drive for video, also through a usb cable, with the video software on "c". I don't notice any difference from when I used everything on "c", or when I changed and did everything internally with two drives, "c" and "d".
As a side note, both external drives are "sata" drives, and both are 750 gig, I don't know if that makes any difference, and I have already had to transfer older music files from the audio drive to the video drive. Hard to believe you can fill a 750 gig drive up in less that a year, but, as noted, digital music files can get to be huge. Just downloaded a .cwb file that was .99 gig for one song, and it is not yet complete, I think there are more tracks coming.
Later
Albert

I save mine on an external drive as well. However, it is still making a project file under my C: drive. I'm not sure how to change this. Generally when I open a project or save one, I change it to go to my external drive. How do I stop it from saving a copy under C: Usually I catch it trying to save to C, but not always. Sometimes I have trouble finding the files.

Annette

Thanks for all the insights, folks. I am going to try offloading everything to external and see what happens. I will back up that drive religiously: I have had bad luck with external drives dropping dead on me.

I periodically copy the whole shebang to a network server also.

Robo, there is a section in tools/global options where it looks like you should be able to set an external drive as the default. I haven't actually tried it yet.

I assume Robo means drag, not slide.
If you want the audio to be moved, you should save your projects as bundle file (.cwb). These are large files containing everything in the project, including audio.
When I do it, I just right-click on the project name and tell the computer to move or copy the project to the exdrive. Again, if it's a project file (.cwp) the audio does not move.

I just "off loaded" 21 song folders yesterday. Simply click to highlight and copy/cut or drag, and paste them to the new drive.

I like working in the cakewalk folder while I'm recording, but once that song is finished.... move it out to a storage drive.

I used to save with bundles but I have had corruption issues as well, so I'm just dragging the complete project folder out.  You can always load the project from any folder and drive on the machine. All saves will be saved in that same folder location.

The only issue I see with working from another drive is that Cake wants to look in it's own folder to start with, so you need to navigate to the other drive. Not a big deal, and I might start working that way on the next song just to see if I like that work flow.

Kalle Rantaaho


Bundle files are not regarded recommendable anymore. They are too vulnerable. I did not have problems with them in the past when I used them, but I've read many have noticed their cwbs gotten corrupt.
Copying the Per Project Audio Folders and cwps is a little clumsy, but more safe AFAIK.
You might also want to "Consolidate Project Audio" first to leave all the unused wavs behind.

And, as mentioned above, even  if you run SONAR using the external HDD for projects, you need something, DVDs or HDD for actual backup. CDs are far too small for even medium size projects.

I had the corruption problem with a couple of Cakewalk Bundle files on my external hard drive a while back.

I always use bundle files. In my case, I realized the problem came from a freeware defragmenting program I was trying.

I also should mention I had a hard drive crash on my primary drive a while back, which might have been the problem to begin with, perhaps writing the corrupt data. But I had the corrupted files long before the hard drive crash, perhaps it was the beginning of the end.

Whatever the case all is working well now. So far so good.  It's something to think about, when you start using programs to defragment and such on your external drive.

I only use my commercial purchased software that I started with now, which is perfect disk pro 8.0., it's never let me down. Although I'm a freeware junkie and like to try all the new techno programs a lot.

I'm not going to mention the freeware defragment program I am speaking of, but I should mention a few other strange things that happened "Some of my Vista Widgets stopped working correctly also", they showed but had a red x for missing graphics, meaning this freeware prg. lost several files during the defragment process, or overwritten them.

Anyway, it's something else to think about when problems arise so I thought I'd mention it.


Bobby

silvercn


While we are on this discussion of files -----as I work on projects, ya end up with (sometimes several copues of ) "Auto-save copy of...... (a project). What do you guys usually do with these? I know its done for protection and backup, but once the original project is done, and saved somewhere - like a CD or xternal, can't these be done away with??? 

I had a problem for the longest time when I first started using Music Creator 4, now I use 5.

 Anyway what was going on at the time was I didn't have an external hard drive, and didn't know nothing about bundle files or anything like that.

So when exiting working on something it would ask me to save the project file so I'd save it,  but when I went to reload it, it would always tell me that the project file name was already taken, meaning I would have to add one more letter or rename it to continue working on it.

 I dunno why but that's how it done at the time for me. So I ended up with a hard drive filling machine every time I tried to work on something.

Now I have an external hard drive, and I always save bundle files to the external HD when done,  and when it ask me if I want to save the project when finished I say no.

I don't use Auto-Save, I have it turned off on my setup. No need, but then again I'm in the habit of backing up or overwriting the bundle files on my external hard drive.

If it's something that you just can't recreate then back it up to disc/external hard drive/flash card or by any means that you can. Use them all and have multiple backups if it's that important.

There are file servers that are free out there where you can save your files to up to a limit of course for free accounts. You can store whatever you think is important. 

Check out Dropbox it's an excellent choice IMO, the free option is only up to 2GBs. You don't have to share anything with anyone unless you choose to.

Although it is a handy site for working on collabs and such. Especially when sending bundle files.

Many thanks to Mr. Bapu for letting me know about this site. IMO, very cool place.

Good Luck!

Bobby