Not the most interesting of posts but keeping system and project data is an obviously important task when you rely on computers for all of your work. My way of doing things won’t work for everyone but it may give you some ideas for designing your own system.
Both my OS and active projects mainly reside on the same drive. This happens to be a 500GB NVMe drive which has been enough most of the time although there have been some occasions where I had to move active projects onto other drives. This tends to happen when I’m mixing certain film scores where the film alone can take up 100GB. In the past it wasn’t a good idea to have both the OS and projects on the same drive but with the bandwidth of an NVMe drive that’s not an issue.
Next I have a SSD reserved for Dropbox. Dropbox store both my personal files and is used on a number of projects either for back-and-forth work or just delivering files. In certain cases I’ve worked directly off of the Dropbox drive when it didn’t make sense to copy everything over to my main drive.
Other than this, in my computer there are 3 other SSDs which are for sample libraries. Nowadays I only use these for the occasional orchestration job. There’s a total of 1.5TB which isn’t enough for all of my sample libraries so there are a few that I rarely use which live off of my system.
It’s important to note that there are no HDDs in my system as the noise generated from those drives is well above the noise floor in my studio so they end up being a major distraction and just limit the dynamic range that I can hear out of my system.
Outside of my studio I have 3 storage systems. The main one is an 8TB NAS which stores archived projects, files like my music library, and backups. This NAS uses a RAID 1 for redundancy. Whenever I wrap up on a project I’ll zip the folder and move it from my main drive onto this NAS. In terms of my backups, I use Acronis to automate my backup system. At the end of every day it backs up my main OS/projects drive as well as my Dropbox drive. At any point in time I can roll my system back to what was on it at the end of the previous day. I lose at most one day’s worth of work.
The next system I have outside of my system is another 8TB drive on the network. This mainly functions as a backup to the main NAS. Acronis copies over any changes made to my project archive on a monthly basis. Acronis also creates a monthly backups of my OS/projects drive. I also keep a backup of other files like my music library but I copy any changes made to chose manually.
The last system that I have is a 4TB offline drive. I manually copy my projects archive and personal files onto it on a quarterly basis. Ideally this drive should be stored off of the premises but I haven’t gotten around to doing that.
In the future it would be nice to have everything backed up to the cloud but at this point I have over 6TB of data to be stored which quickly gets expensive in subscription fees.