I have been saving copies of all my Sonar projects to an external (Passport) drive.  If I am going to be away from home, I take it with me.  My idea was that if my house burned or was vandalized, I would have back-up copies of my projects.
 
Recently, however, I learned that Picture Cache and Wave Data are **always** on your internal drive (or, more accurately, they are always on the same drive according to your configuration—usually your internal drive).  And I learned the hard way that if those files are screwed up, your project is screwed up.
 
So, does that mean my emergency copies are worthless since I won't have Picture Cache and Wave Data?  And if I copied those files to the external drive, could Sonar find them when I tried to use those emergency copies, or would it get confused about the path?
 
PS File management is my least favorite thing about Sonar.

You can remove the picture cache data completely and Sonar will just regenerate it. In fact that's one way to get rid of corrupted data and start fresh. You can also choose to re-compute pictures from within Sonar.
 
The Wave data folder won't contain anything important if you've saved into per-project folders. All your wave data is in the folders.
 
File management is actually one of my favorite aspects of Sonar thanks to auto-save, per-project folders, The ability to export all tracks as individual files that last the duration of the song (with or without attributes like automation), BWF stamping, and bundles for making quick temp backups on USB thumb drives. Just give me a big hard drive and a Blu-Ray burner, and I'm a happy guy.
 
 

Yah what he said. THe easiest way is to just do a Save As and copy the audio data over to a different drive. 
 
The ONE thing I wish SONAR did was actually hard save the synth patches. It "remembers" settings but if you have a total system meltdown and for whatever reason (there's many) a reinstalled synth doesn't get recognized as itself, you're hosed. Once you've got all audio you're golden. But synth patches and plugins? Ugh.
 

...wicked
Yah what he said. THe easiest way is to just do a Save As and copy the audio data over to a different drive. 
 
The ONE thing I wish SONAR did was actually hard save the synth patches. It "remembers" settings but if you have a total system meltdown and for whatever reason (there's many) a reinstalled synth doesn't get recognized as itself, you're hosed. Once you've got all audio you're golden. But synth patches and plugins? Ugh.

Sonar has very robust sys ex storage. Before the days of virtual instruments, you could save data from all your synths, processors, etc. - anything that produced system exclusive data - as a sys ex dump and send it back into your devices at any time.
 
However...there's a somewhat equivalent function for virtual devices, which by a most curious coincidence, was going to be the subject for tomorrow's tip of the day. But I'll post it later today instead.

konradh - as you know I've mentioned to you before that regularly backing up your entire set of OS and other internal disks to external hard disks with Acronis is a great way to feel you're covered in that regard.  It can give you some peace of mind and you can sleep better.
 
I keep a rotation of different external drives I have the backups on, because if you only back up to one external drive even that can fail. Over the years I've had several external drives fail inexplicably.  But if you have more than one backup and on different drives you have plenty of failsafe in that regard.  I keep at least one external hard drive offsite in a different location in case a meteor hits and wipes out my studio.  I'll still be able to restore.
 
With Acronis (or another similar tool that allows you to back up everything including the system), even if you hit a bad website and something malicious gets in and starts displaying an annoying dialog box that you can't figure out how to remove, you can step back to a backup before that started to happen and return your entire set up to where it was before that happened.  You don't need to be an IT wizard to try to figure out where the culprit is.  It's just a couple clicks to kick off the restore process.

lawajava
I keep a rotation of different external drives I have the backups on, because if you only back up to one external drive even that can fail.

All good advice, to which I would add that when I back up to optical storage, I save to at least two discs from different manufacturers. That way if there's a bad production run of discs I'll have an alternative.

OK, Based on the wisdom here, I withdraw my comments about file management.  It was just my lack of understanding.  THANKS.  :-)

The best way is to copy the files per xcopy to another drive:
xcopy /s /e /v /c /r /d /y f:\project1 x:\
 
for all Projects:
xcopy /s /e /v /c /r /d /y f:\*.* x:\
 
Make this as a batchfile (*.bat).
We do this since over ten years for over 1000 Projects.

THambrecht
The best way is to copy the files per xcopy to another drive:
xcopy /s /e /v /c /r /d /y f:\project1 x:\
 
for all Projects:
xcopy /s /e /v /c /r /d /y f:\*.* x:\
 
Make this as a batchfile (*.bat).
We do this since over ten years for over 1000 Projects.

THambrecht,
Excuse my ignorance, but can you elaborate? What is xcopy?
 

...wicked
Yah what he said. THe easiest way is to just do a Save As and copy the audio data over to a different drive. 
 
The ONE thing I wish SONAR did was actually hard save the synth patches. It "remembers" settings but if you have a total system meltdown and for whatever reason (there's many) a reinstalled synth doesn't get recognized as itself, you're hosed. Once you've got all audio you're golden. But synth patches and plugins? Ugh.
 

I've gotten into the habit of saving all of my synth settings as presets in their own folder in the project directory. You never know what could go wrong and there is NOTHING worse than losing that awesome Prism patch you spent the best part of 2 months tweaking to perfection.

As for back ups I am pretty sold on the whole Gobbler backup system. I don't even have to think about it now, all my projects are backed up whenever I save them, and I can very easily revert back to any version should I need to. It's amazing.