ProTools vs. Ardour. Why spend the money 797

Unruh

Yeah, life sucks. Nothing lasts forever and even before "forever" poo sometimes happens. You can mitigate risks any way you choose. Or you can choose to take them. Does your recording really HAVE to last forever? The big problem is that projects seem to TAKE forever to get finished so you want to make sure that all the little bits and pieces are still avaiable. If you work this way, then you need to develop a way of butturing that you'll have those pieces when you need them.

What's the tradegy if you lose everything? Are you doing something that you can't recreate and that's important enough to recrreate? Backups trade one inconvenience for another. That's all. You probalby should back up your large corporation's financial data daily. If you're a studio you probably should back up projects while they're in progress, but when the project's finished, you hand over whatever media the client wants (and pays for) and say "thanks for the business."

I never said that you shouldn't do backups. It's something you should decide if, when, and how you do them.

Responsibility is part of professionalism. But so is making intelligent decisions. If the client is coming in tomorrow for another session, do you back up today's session? Some do, some don't. I suspect that most don't. If the client is going on tour and won't be back for another couple of months, you remove his files from the working system disk and store them elsewhere, usually on the client's own drive. If you have a fire and the drive is lost, tough luck, unless you've taken the precaution to back up that drive and store that secondary backup in another place. Some people do that. Some people consider that it's essential. But it's a choice that you make.

I expect that my clients understand the volatility of any media wheter it's a hard drive, a CD-R, or even a sheet of paper with all the session notes on it. They expect me to take reasonable care with their project materials and I do what I think is necessary, and I charge accordingly. There's nothing wrong with charging enough to pay for your time and materials for backup up projects on whatever schedule you feel comfortable with. But there's a limit to what I'm willing to do for free.

If what you're willing to do for free is diddle with computers, then that's your choice.