Topic: What do you do with your master .wav files?

[achalsey]

I'm new to the game and not too hardcore about it so the .wav's get deleted. 

Just archive the whole file that gets uploaded on the internet on the external.

[doodee]

Whether you keep your WAV's or only the FLAC's, if it's something you really care about, have two backup systems. Learned the hard way when a Seagate bit the big one after only 5 months losing 500GB of music. I recommend Western Digital as far as external HD's go.

[F.O.Bean]

Burn Data WAVS, then flac and burn those. then burn a flac24 and a separate flac16 dvd

[rjp]

I FLAC them, and store them on my ZFS-based OpenIndiana (a Solaris derivative) file server. This is currently set up in a RAID-Z2 configuration (roughly equivalent to RAID-6, with two redundant drives). In turn, the storage pool gets copied to a separate set of disks periodically, also ZFS. ZFS is extra-paranoid, going so far as checksumming every block written, and never overwriting live data. I've configured the system to perform a "scrub" (checking for bad blocks) every week. Since the motherboard is a recent AMD-based ASUS, it supports (and I use) ECC RAM for extra reliability.

The main storage pool is currently 3 TB, with 8x500 GB Western Digital Blue drives, hanging off an Intel SASUC8I controller. The motherboard has six SATA ports, and there's also a two-port SATA card as well, in addition to the SASUC8I. One solid-state drive (now a Samsung, after the previous OCZ failed) provides caching. Losing the cache drive doesn't cause data loss.

I'm considering the idea of switching the main storage to two mirrored pairs of 1.5T drives, and leaving the remaining four slots open for further expansion. All drives except the SSD are in hot-swap cages; if necessary I could offline a failed HD, yank it out, and slam in a new one without shutting down.

[dean]

I used to FLAC them, but I have heard stories of FLAC's not decompressing correctly

  Do tell!  Everything I've ever experienced (MD5s) shows that it is perfect everytime.

Terry

Same question I have...

[H₂O]

For wavs I flac then delete.  For wsds I keep on 2 seperate hdds.

[rockymtnryan]

I've been thinking about back-up and long-term storage for recording masters lately; haven't really decided on a plan.  Here's what I'm doing now...

Old Desktop PC
Increased RAM, installed digital sound card, serves as media server.  Use MediaMonkey to store library. 2 external drives, 1TB and a 2TB.  I have all of my music stored on these drives, the 1TB has bands A-M and the 2TB holds bands N-Z.  Entire library is FLAC and all files tagged for organization. Example album title "2011-04-23 Bluebird Theater, Denver, CO  busman audio bsc1/k41" .  That way MediaMonkey will keep all the tracks organized and if I have multiple sources of a show they stay organized too.  Internal hard drive holds 24bit raw wav files as back up.

Laptop
Holds all 24bit raw wav files, as well as edited 16bit FLAC files of recordings.  I use the laptop as editing station.

Portable
Use old iPod Classic 30GB for headphones or in the car.  Rockboxed to play FLAC files.

Flash Drives
Hold copies of edited 16bit FLAC files of recordings.

So the raw 24bits are saved in 2 places, and the 16bit edited files are in multiple places.  I might just grab another external strictly for the 24bit raw wav files to make it 3 storage areas.  I just don't see 3 hard drives all failing at the same time.

[John Willett]

SSIA

Flac'em Burn'em Delete'em

All recordings - session recordings and masters are saved onto several different hard disks in different locations.

I never compress or save in a different format than the one recorded.

[Teen Age Riot]

I used to archive everything on DVDs until I found that some of them couldn't be read anymore, even if they didn't have any visible flaws. This is of course very frustrating, considering that even my old data CD-Rs, which go back to 2001, are all perfect.

Long story short, everything's on external drives now.

[F.O.Bean]

I used to archive everything on DVDs until I found that some of them couldn't be read anymore, even if they didn't have any visible flaws. This is of course very frustrating, considering that even my old data CD-Rs, which go back to 2001, are all perfect.

Long story short, everything's on external drives now.

This is why I use class 1 Verbatim DVD+/-R's

[moooose]

My master .wav files get ID metadata and are copied to a RAID NAS + a different single external hard disk. The metadata are used by Audiofinder to build a database.