Mixed Emotions Music - Hard Drive Policy

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Our Drives

• We have 18G of drive space available for clients projects.
• Space is only guaranteed available during booked times.
• Data restoration and/or backups are considered billable hours.
• We back up data to Sony AIT tapes via Retrospect software.
• Client assumes all risk and responsibility for archiving data.
• We cannot guarantee drives will be loaded outside of booked session hours, though we will do our best to accommodate such requests.

Guest Drives

• Make sure your hard drive is a DigiDesign Pro Tools approved drive (visit www.digidesign.com for the list of approved drives). Unapproved drives often cause conflicts and cause the system to crash, and are also not supported by the companies tech support line. Therefor, we will only use approved drives for sessions at Mixed Emotions Music.
• Crashes and SCSI conflicts that cause lost time due to system crashes are considered the clients responsibility of the client while guest drives are attached.
• Any drive maintenance/Repair/Optimizing of guest drives is at the discretion of Mixed Emotions Music staff and is completed at the clients risk. All such time is considered billable.

Our Thoughts and Recommendations:

Backups and Archiving

Data backups can fail- both the software and the backup media can have problems that prevent data from restoring properly. For that reason, we recommend multiple AIT back ups during sessions, and then doing final back ups to multiple media (i.e. AIT and CD-R) at the end of a project.

While this will add time to your session, it far outweighs the feeling of data coming back scrambled. While pretty rare- it happens, and the only way to deal with this is to be prepared for it.

Another benefit of redundant back ups on multiple media is archiving. CD-R's will probably archive better than AIT tape, though there are drawbacks. Archiving 20+ gig of data to 650M CD's takes a long time, and is a real drag. However, a few years from now it would probably outweigh a data dropout on a tape!

Probably the most robust backup is... analog tape! Blowing the tracks out to 2" analog for archiving is a very robust and probably the most fail safe method going. If this is something you are interested in, please speak to us about it. While we don't offer this service directly, we can help arrange it for you. Keep in mind, however, this will preserve the audio components, not the session documents. But the sessions documents are fairly small even on very complex sessions, and can be backed off to multiple media in a relatively short time.

Drive Maintenance

Drives used for Pro Tools get a pretty good workout, and need to be maintained. Low level reformats should be performed periodically to insure your drive is in good shape. Occasionally, drives get damaged (i.e. the directory, or bad blocks), and need to be repaired. We have several disk repair utilities to help deal with this situation.

We are happy to provide any assistance to your on preparing your media for bringing into the studio. Defragmented drives are happy drives, so it's always recommended to keep your drives defragmented. The best way to do this, is not with a defragging utility, but by copying the whole mass of files from one volume to another. A defragging utility will look at any available space, and could possibly slow your session down by spreading data out across the drives.

Terms of Business | Hard Drive Policy | Close