Moving Project Files to External Drive

[Jaydon134]

I have a couple of completed projects that I don't really need to access anymore, and I would like to store them on an external drive. Currently, both the project files and source media are stored locally with the source media in folders on my desktop. I have a few questions. First, if I rename or move the source media folders, does Smoke follow the updated file path, or are the links to the media files broken? Second, is there a way to move both the source and project files to an external drive for long term storage? I would like to be able to access them if I need to, but I don't want them taking up space on my machine's drive. Third, is there a better way to do long term storage of projects that I haven't thought of? Thank you so much for your help; learning Smoke has been quite an experience for me.

Jaydon

[Anonymous]

You need to read the section in your help file that deals with archiving.

It's very straightforward.

In the mediahub, navigate to the "Archive" tab (top of the screen).

Navigate to your external hard drive.

Create a new archive.

There are options for segment size - keep it manageable - personally i have a blu-ray burner tied in to a system so I choose 25GB chunks.

Press the "Archive Project" button.

If you choose to include media, the software will import the media, then write it back out to disk.

You can choose to not include media and that will mean that when you restore the archive you will need to relink to source media.

(This option requires that you manually copy all the media that you used to this same extrnal disk.)

Do one or the other but not both.

You can choose to include caches and renders or you can choose to exclude them.

If you exclude them, when you restore from the archive you will need to re-render those caches and timelines.

Choosing the "Archive Project" option means that any setups that you made - CFX, colour correction, timeline FX etc will be archived as well.

When the archive is finished you should take a look in the /usr/discreet/archive directory and there should be an XML, an HTML and some other files that allow you tobrowse the contents of the archive, even if the external disk is not connected.

Try the whole procedure with a new small project first so that you can wrap your noodle around the process.

Keep the manual to hand.

When you're ready to pull the trigger for real, sit back and watch.

Good luck.