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Making work mobile between two towers
Hey all,
I was hoping I could get some advice from people who do this… work with media/projects/assets at work, take things home to work from there,and vice versa.
My living situation will be changing in the next week or two… I’ll be going from being 30 seconds away from my work to close to an hour. If things needed to be done, renders need to be started, deadlines needed to be met, etc… I would just stay late or walk over late to get things finished up.
Now, I will be needing to take work home and work from there at the end of the day.. so I need to keep projects “mirrored”. Has anyone found a good method to this? So assets don’t get lost/forgotten, etc.?
I use AE CS4 and FCP 7 at work… I have a Drobo where I store all client folders with graphics, project files, assets… I have a MacPro tower with internal drives where my capture scratch is located for digitizing clips. At home I have same programs and a MacPro as well, so I’m covered there at least.
I realize I’ll need to copy/transfer capture scratch to my home tower when the project calls for it, but most of my work is graphics (as I’m mainly a motion designer)… so most of the time I work from my Drobo here at work. The Drobo unit belongs to my work, so I thought of purchasing my own (as I’ve been wanting one for my own purposes) and hauling that back and forth from work and home… but it would be very nice if my two units were always mirrored.. so the work one always stayed at my office… in case something happened or something got left in one place, etc.
I may be over-thinking this too, though so anyone who deals with this, please… I’d love to hear the most efficient and fail-safe way you’ve found to accomplish this.
Thanks!
Brad Hodgson
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4 Replies
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[Brad Hodgson] “I need to keep projects “mirrored”. Has anyone found a good method to this? So assets don’t get lost/forgotten, etc.? “
Yup. Clone the media drive. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to make sure you get everything. Same directory structure, same DRIVE name, everything. Then color code the drives so that you know which is which. BUT, what this DOESN’T do is carry over any new render files. So if you work at home, then render, and take the project file to work, and open it up on the drive there…the render files won’t be there. They are at home. You’ll need to copy those to a portable drive and bring them to the other system. Making sure you have the latest ones can be tricky…and if you render on BOTH systems, and need the render files to go back and forth…you can easily get lost. I don’t have a good answer for that other than color code your render files. Or name the projects something slightly different MY GREAT PROJECT A and MY GREAT PROJECT B. That way your render files have those names, and you know which render files to copy over.
As for always keeping the DROBOs mirrored…that is tough to do when they are in separate locations, and you add stuff to one. You then need to keep track of ALL the assets and exports, and copy them to the other DROBO at home. That too can get hairy. I have no quick tips on that other than perhaps color coding and/or writing this all down to keep track.
This can get VERY messy…
Shane
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If you are looking for a way to keep your psd, ai, etc. files mirrored between your two towers, you could use something like Dropbox: https://www.getdropbox.com/
If you were to move your client elements folders into your dropbox folder, the application will sync the most recent version across all computers. So if you make a change at home or work, the new version will automatically get copied to the other location. You could even keep your FCP and aep project files in there as well.
I have been using the free 2GB account, so that would limit you to supporting elements, but you can get 100GB accounts, so in theory that would cover any current renders you are working on. Definitely something to test out before diving in too far, but it *seems* like it should work!
2 x3Ghz Quad MacPro
9 GB RAM
Mac OS X 10.5.5
QT 7.5.5
FCP 6.0.5
AJA Kona 3 (6.0.1 drivers)
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Cool, thanks for the reply Shane… great advice.
Brad Hodgson
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Lovely! Thanks, Matt. That sounds like it would work well… I’ll check it out.
Brad Hodgson
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