[Brian Busher]

Ed,
We’ve been debating the same thing here about keeping the camera original MXF files from our XF300 with all their supporting folders. I’m always nervous deleting camera originals (it feels like throwing aways tapes to me) but in the end, we’ll have the transcoded files from FCPX stored on two doubly-redundant drobo pro FS drives so it might not matter. The problem i’ve noticed is that FCPX does not seem to be smart enough to relink to the file it created from the MXF original back to the MXF if the optimized media goes off line. That is a big reason why we’re leaning towards backing up the transcoded files and ditching the camera originals.

On the other hand, h.264 files from DSLR cameras are relatively small and easy to work with. FCPX did not have any problems relinking to these files if the project went offline, so we keep those files and dump the ProRes transcoded files when archiving a finished edit. FCPX can reimport them and re-transcode them if you need to rebuild an edit from scratch.

Good luck,
-Brian

[Brian Busher]

Ed,
I’ve been developing a workflow for just what you are describing over the last few days. I believe you and i are working towards the same goal: backing up our projects on a regular basis in case of catastrophe. A lot of this can be done manually from within FCPX as has been discussed. However, if you edit like me backups happen far less frequently than they should if i am doing them manually, and you are looking for a more automated solution.

Here’s what i think i know so far:
Final Cut Pro X wants to create Event and Project files on the same drive as all of your media files. Since FCPX buries these project and event files in with massive amounts of media, targeting the event/project folders on the drives creates backups that are far too large. And unlike FXP 7 and before, FCPX names ALL of the event and project files the exact same thing, namely “CurrentVersion.fcpevent” or “CurrentVersion.fcpproject”. This makes a targeted backup based on file extensions unviable as well. I used to use automator to backup all files with .fcp extension to a backup folder. It worked wonderfully.

So far, here’s my solution:
I use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup my drives every night with a custom filter. I have it exclude file types mov,wav,cal, and fppl and exclude all of the folders that might contain large media files with custom rules. The rules are “- Analysis Files”, ‘- Backups”, “- Old Versions”, “- Original Media”, “- Render Files”, and “- Transcoded Media”

This seems to be working in my tests and creates an archive with all of the folder structure you would need to recreate a project of a drive failed. Recreating the project will mean using FCPX to relink the media files, which opens another batch of problems which are being discussed elsewhere. The biggest hurdle for us has been relinking to MXF files from our new XF300. As of now, i have not been able to accomplish this, and am woking on a new workflow for that camera’s footage. the good news is that DSLR footage, graphics from After Effects, music, VO, etc. all seem to reconnect fine, and the project is up and running again in no time.

Hopefully this helps. Any feedback from the community would be greatly appreciated since i am currently testing this workflow. As my boss says, we can’t be the only ones out there with this problem. I am curious to know what others are doing to backup their events/projects.

-Brian