Topic: How do you store your raw/master files?

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I have a bunch of external hard drives and I'm loathe to spend more cash on another set right now so I'm tempted to redo how I store my master files to reclaim enough space to last me till the end of the year (when I'll be more apt to get new drives). How do you store your stuff?

[twatts (pants are so over-rated...)]

I'm doing mostly DAT Transfers, but regardless the idea is the same:

I copy my Master WAV off the Flash Card onto my PC.
I cut off any extra silence with CDWave and save as "bandname2013-06-25 - 1648.wav"
I create a WAV MD5.
I FLAC. (lvl 8 for least amount of space used)
I create FLAC MD5.

I save it all in a "master" folder along with the 1644 Master (FLAC w/ WAV and FLAC MD5s), CUE Sheets, and anything else I have for the show (pix, scan of ticketstubs, etc.).  This "master" folder lives inside the folder I make for FLACs I Seed on ETREE (or however).  It ends up taking up a ton of space...

I save all the FLACs on HDDs...  I'm slowly running out of space, I've had to delete some dusty SHN/FLAC collections that never got played anymore (bye-bye Zeppelin and Clapton)... 

Terry


ETA I ahve approx 6TBs external and 1.5TB internal...  I think my next upgrade will be a pair of 3TBs internal...  That should set me up for at least another year or so! 

[hoppedup]

flac it, put it on two hard drives. I have some files that are on three or more hard drives. I've been meaning to store the redundant hard drives off-site, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

I will pm my address to the first person who responds that storage is so cheap these days that we should just store the .wav files. Then they can send me as many 2TB drives as they can afford.

[kindms]

I burn to physical DVD media. I can usually do 16/44.1 24/48 and master recording (ie whatever file came out of my recorder).

rename and flac all of it creating ffp files for each version

I keep whatever is the highest bit rate recording on HDD for playback purposes.

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has anyone who stores flacs tried to do test decodes of older material and run into issues? I did once but it was off of optical media. I'm curious if anyone's had a problem with hdds (aside from crashes).

[bombdiggity]

I save the original wav/s. 

I save the final edit 24bit (usually as wav again) and if I do a 16bit edit that too but in final aligned flac. 

I try to have all the masters on at least two drives. 

A friend had converted all his masters to flac for storage.  At least one of those conversions was corrupt.  It will still somehow play through but cannot be decoded by any means either of us can find.  That made me not trust doing that with the source files (tests and checks notwithstanding).  I don't know how he processed or qc'd it though... 

Given that I've got upwards of 20 drives around here with all the bittorrent/trades I'm past the point of worrying how much space it takes (in a relative sense). 

[bombdiggity]

has anyone who stores flacs tried to do test decodes of older material and run into issues? I did once but it was off of optical media. I'm curious if anyone's had a problem with hdds (aside from crashes).

Not directly but as I'd typed above I know someone who has. 

Optical media is NOT reliable after a certain number of years (that varies with brand as well as any number of random factors).  It will degrade. 

Redundancy and circulation are the only answers to that issue. 

[Ultfris101]

Hmmm, i haven't had any decode problems with old FLACs but the oldest ones I have are ones I torrented down and didn't record myself. I may need to rethink the value of saving space at the risk of undecodable flacs.

I've been saving raw files in a "raw" directory as wav until I'm done working with the show and then I've been flac'ing them. The directory they stay in is covered by carbonite but takes a while to get up there. I also copy to another local internal drive periodically. I usually keep the CUE sheets but delete the final processed full file, in lieu of saving the 24 bit flac/tracked set.

For my longer standing collection of recordings (4000+ shows) I cracked open all the external drives I had and made a Freenas 4+2 Raidz2 volume (4 data discs + 2 parity. I can lose up to any two discs and still be ok). Currently just 1tb drives but plan to upgrade them all to 2tb at some point to get about 7tb usable. I'll use that as long term storage eventually. I need a mirrored system as a backup too tho.

I'm not bothering with DVD backups anymore. local and remote mirrored  hard drives (ideally some economical cloud solutions eventually). LMA helps a lot with peace of mind for stuff that can be stored there.

[F.O.Bean]

I burn the raw master in data WAVS and FLAC on separate DVDRs!

[Chuck]

I store the WAVs and FLACs separately on DVD-R's and two mirrored hard drives.

[adrianf74]

I store the WAVs and FLACs separately on DVD-R's and two mirrored hard drives.

I don't go that far but store the raw FLAC files in one folder and the mastered files in another.  They exist on one drive (main media computer) that has a parity drive associated with it (so it's, in theory, backed up).  I then have the files stored on two portable USB 3.0 hard drives (one stored on site and one off site which comes back to me every 3-4 months for updating).

I don't think I can be more safe than that.

[F.O.Bean]

I have four copies of every set I record, all onto HQ Verbatim DVDRs! Raw WAV/Raw FLAC/Tracked FLAC 24 bit and Tracked FLAC 16 bit I think I'm good to go

[adrianf74]

I have four copies of every set I record, all onto HQ Verbatim DVDRs! Raw WAV/Raw FLAC/Tracked FLAC 24 bit and Tracked FLAC 16 bit I think I'm good to go

I did that once upon a time... on DVD-R's and ran into some serious read issues with even though they were certified Taiyo Yuden discs and were stored properly. I'd sooner store shows on hard drives.

[F.O.Bean]

I have four copies of every set I record, all onto HQ Verbatim DVDRs! Raw WAV/Raw FLAC/Tracked FLAC 24 bit and Tracked FLAC 16 bit I think I'm good to go

I did that once upon a time... on DVD-R's and ran into some serious read issues with even though they were certified Taiyo Yuden discs and were stored properly. I'd sooner store shows on hard drives.

I just went from 10-12 year old Verbatim CDRs>INHDD and everyone transferred perfectly. I know some problems might arise, but so far, so good. And that's why I burn 4 separate copies. Also, 99% of what I record goes to archive.org, and the other 1% goes to bt.etree.org, so if I ever needed anything because of a bad DVDRS, I always have those to back me up as well

[Chuck]

I have had good luck with 10 year+ old CD-R's too. My DVD-R's are not as old, but I haven't found any "bad" discs when I go in and re-seed old copies of shows I've recorded years ago. I store them in Tyvek envelopes in plastic bins in a dark closet.