Managing your Production Computer

[Musiclab]

Hi. I have spent the last couple of years learning about audio recording and basic MIDI stuff in a DIY manner. This has taken me from an old P4 XP laptop to a Quad core XP Pro desk top to a Macbook. I also started on Live 6LE & 7LE, then onto Intro and now full 8.1.4. I have Logic Express 8 and spend a lot of time in GarageBand. I tried demo's of Reaper and other prog's as well. I also now have a small collection of MIDI controllers and 3 Audio Interfaces.

Crunch time has arrived and its time to ditch the things that I don't gel with, both hardware and software. My main project now is coming to grips with managing all of my software and related files so that I don't have the massive task of sorting it all out again in the future. I do everything on my Macbook at the moment (although I am considering heading back to my PC Quad because of the combination of Ableton and the partner piano instrument I bought- 1 instance and cpu @ %60 )

Basically what I am inquiring about is how you manage and keep a track of your core software. I have truck loads of demo's, loops, Live packs and paid/free apps that I DL'd that need to go. I either did not like them or don't need them. I suspect many of you are buying and DL'ing stuff all the time and your HD's are filling up. You need to flush the system every now and then but also hang onto all of your keepers. I also have an OS upgrade on the cards. Do you have a strategy to deal with this? Currently I only have the 1 machine (macbook) that I do everything with, no dedicated audio machine.

My research so far for my immediate situation has lead me to:

1. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my HD on to an ext HD. Because I can boot from this (as I understand it) I can essentially continue running as if nothing has happened. This gives me time to...

2. Do a fresh install, wipe clean and upgrade the macbook OS. Then I can selectively choose, Download and install Live and my keeper app's and reorganize my file system (it is a shocker the way I have it organized now).

Question: Is it worth picking up a HD to clone the new system HD once I have all of my essentials installed? My thought is that I could periodically re clone when prog's are updated (if CCC allows only program copying and not files which is what I use time machine for right)? Then I would have (me thinks) a painless way to go back to square one when I need to clean up the system again.

I am also thinking of recording everything to an ext hard drive from now on via the FW400 rather than the system HD (only a 250 gig 5400rpm drive).

Does anyone have a better/different strategy to stay organized and lean?

Thanks.

[Musiclab]

Any CCC experts want to help me set up a sensible cloning/back up regime for my mac that lets me differentiate between my OS, my 3rd party apps etc and my created documents and files?

[luddy]

Well, assuming you can afford a new hard drive, then I'd suggest you

1) clone the existing drive
2) clean out the existing drive, i.e., delete all the excess downloaded stuff
-OR
do a fresh install as you mentioned, and pull over select stuff from the clone
3) test it for a few days to make sure you have everything you need!
4) start using the extra hard drive as a time machine backup

Something like that anyway. there are lots of variations that will get you there.

You don't need CCC (although it's a nice program). You can use disk utility to create a clone of your drive and it will be A-OK. Disk utility is rock solid for that purpose. For ongoing backups, time machine is great and equally rock-solid.

-Luddy

[rasputin]

I did pretty much what luddy suggested. My 320 GB drive on my Q6600 CPU Windows PC was getting sort of full and had a few thousand hours on it. I bought a 500 GB SATA Seagate Barracuda (very quiet drive) and basically just plugged it into my motherboard. Software came with the Seagate which did a perfect clone of the old drive onto it.

I am still running both drives in parallel, but eventually I can delete all the stuff I think I'll never use off the new drive. At some point I might actually disconnect the old drive since it won't use any power.

However at the point it is sort of nice to be able to back up new sets to it. Sometimes they're too large to copy to DVD-R.

The other alternative is to buy a HS USB box and either put your old drive in it or a blank new drive and use it as a backup.

HDDs dont last forever but they are very reliable. Also, stashing an old drive on a shelf is no guarantee it will spin up if you plug it in several years later.

YMMV