Back ups for FCP projects

[David Eaks]

[Barbara Santi] “Copying / pasting to an external hard drive just deletes whats backed up previously and starts from scratch and takes up loads of time.”

If your just trying to backup your most current work on a particular edit, and all your capture file’s and other media are already copied to your backup drive, all you need to do is copy the project file. No need to over-write all of your original media every time, unless your making changes to those files themselves. If you have new files that need to be backed up, copy them over too. Depending on your project, managing a backup manually can be a challenge…

Time Machine should work though. For example if you have a 1TB drive that contains one specific project and all of it’s related media totaling 750GB, setup Time Machine on a 2TB drive to backup only the drive with your project on it. The time machine drive will fill with 750GB and then begin incremental backups of only what has changed. If the only changes are just cut’s on a timeline, Time Machine only needs to copy the tiny little project file. Just plug in the time machine drive and click backup now whenever you want to do a backup. The larger the Time machine drive is, the further back in time it will save.

I back up manually but I’m sure someone will have some advise on a better method than Time Machine. Like Carbon Copy Cloner, which I’m about to start using.

[Barbara Santi]

thanks for your message. Yes thats what I did with Time machine – just choose the project which needs updating. But it started saying that I hadnt backed up for more than 160 days or something and it couldnt back up – it turned out that it wanted to back up the whole project again – I spoke to apple and they explained why it was happening (far too complicated) – they suggested not using it or getting a bigger hard drive. Im already using 1.5 & 2 tb hard drives and cant afford a Raid system so am trying to find an alternative method.

your first option is what I was doing beforehand but when you edit its difficult to remember what youve been doing so it didnt work for me.

thanks for now
best
B

[Chris Tompkins]

Drag you proj. folder onto your back-up hard drive nightly or whenever you want to.

Done.

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC

[Barbara Santi]

no not done. My projects are 1tb + so takes a very long time longer than overnight sometimes and its stupid to have to copy from scratch when sometimes its only small changes that have been made. There must be a better more effecient way for larger fcp docs?
thanks tho
Barbara

[Chris Tompkins]

The proj. Folder Not the media. Do u organize your proj. In a folder? How big r ur proj.?

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC

[Barbara Santi]

as said before the fcp projects are 1TB files

[David Eaks]

Are you sure that your .fcp files are 1TB? That seems a tad larger than normal…

Find your project file, it’s a .fcp file, and just copy that to your backup drive. The .fcp file size should be in the range of MB’s (not TB’s) and copy in seconds.

What version of Final Cut are you using?

[Rafael Amador]

[Barbara Santi] “as said before the fcp projects are 1TB files”
The fcp project is the file that you double click to open FC and display your time line.
That contains no media.
Every time that you change something, save it with a different name.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Barbara Santi]

thanks for your messages – its not as easy as just updating fcp file as sometimes I add material – I have a number of different projects running at the same time – theres no way Id remember everything what Ive done – there must be an easier way but thanks for your comments.

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Barbara,
Not sure if you are looking for something like this:

https://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/

That will back up the changes in the folders you want, when you want.
Is free.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com