External Hard Drives - Best Practices

[jankyjameson]

What are some best practices that experienced producers are using, regarding library storage and external drives? I searched around and couldn't find a similar thread, and thought something like this may help prevent many headaches for DAW users in their journey.

A problem I experienced recently for instance, is this: switched to a new external drive, moved my sample and user libraries over, seemingly all good. Continue making stuff for about a month or two, then one day go searching for an instrument I made a while back. I then realize that references to samples in all clips and instruments I've saved in the past are pointing to the old drive.. All tracks containing clips, all sampler instruments, etc now produce the dreaded orange stripe at the bottom of the screen, asking to locate the files. (Btw, is there some batch process for recovering library locations across multiple instruments, or are we still only able to do it one instance at a time?)

Example: I create a drum rack, containing a bunch of samples that are on "My Western Digital". I save the instrument to my user library. I then switch to a new hard drive, "My Samsung Drive". I move my Core Library and User Library over to "My Samsung Drive". All sets still have their file references, because of "collect all and save, but now all my user instruments are still looking for samples on "My Western Digital". Unlike sets, I know of no "collect all and save" for instruments (although it surprises me this isn't the default procedure for saving user presets).

I'm sure many other users have experienced this. So my question is, how do other users avoid this? Would a best practice be: choose a name for your library drive, and then name all subsequent drives the same? Is anyone doing this? What am I missing?

[jonljacobi]

I keep my user stuff on a NAS box where all my machines can access it. But I keep the Ableton stuff local since it’s static and it’s too slow to load if it’s across the network.

I always collect and save so that the project is portable. That’s key.

[jestermgee]

OS?

If the path to the content changes, you lose your references. If you have stuff on an ext drive in Windows for instance, the drive name makes no difference but the drive letter is what matters so the letter the drive grabs must always be the same so if you have multiple drives you either need to connect them in the same order every time or get some kind of utility that reserves the USB drive letter for a drive.

As mentioned above, you should always do a "Collect/Save" to move any samples you use into the project folder so they are never lost.

[Da hand]

or get some kind of utility that reserves the USB drive letter for a drive.

Fully agreed regarding the drive letter in Windows.

One note, you can set a permanent drive letter for each external hard drive within Windows with the Disk Management tool (Computer Management >> Storage >> Disk Management - I access Computer Management by right clicking on "This PC" in the startup menu or Explorer and then choosing "Manage").