FastBikerBoy
Personally - I don't try and manage clips outside of Sonar, I let Sonar handle those. I.e if I bounce clips within Sonar and the clip is in the track I don't worry about trying to find it outside of Sonar. In all the time I've been using Sonar I've never had it "lose" a clip yet, and I have used the "Clean Audio Folders" from time to time.
I also use projects across two machines from time to time and for that I use a sync manager, that is called FreeFileSync that as the name suggests is free. It's like MS Synctoy but better (IMHO). Again never had clips go missing using that .
If I need a clip outside of Sonar I use export and choose where to put it and manage it that way. I do that several times a day when working as I'm often moving narration clips from Sonar to Camtasia.
For backup I use "Per Project" folders and image the whole drive either daily or weekly depending on how busy/crucial the current project crop is.
Obviously it's a bit late for you now but in future I wouldn't bother trying to track clips outside of Sonar unless you've exported them. Remember you can drag and drop to the browser or Windows Explorer if that's more convenient.
Karl, I may have confused the topic a bit, but I'm not sure where we've gotten the idea that I was doing anything outside Sonar for these clips. During these sessions, I'm only using Sonar. I don't like the editor so much, but it's doing the job. So, I'm not sure where I gave the impression that I'm editing or managing clips outside Sonar. All I did was back up everything in the Cakewalk Projects folder and simply restore them. I suspect that should have been enough for restoring all my work after rebuilding my machine, right? I know those bounced clips existed, but they sure weren't in the folder all the other ones were. I'm baffled, to be honest.
Not aimed at you, but really the forum in general: It's frustrating enough to have something odd like that happen, and I simply can't explain or understand what exactly went wrong, but it just adds to the unhappiness to have a board full of people question how I'm doing things. I try to keep things as simple as possible so that if something goes wrong, it's easier to troubleshoot, perhaps.
Anyway, I'm going to try using Per Project and as of right now, I'm good. Thanks!