Prism Sound Orpheus - Audio Media

KeepitSafeBACKING UP YOUR STUDIOHow quickly can you get asession up and running ifyour workstation goes down?RICHARD WENTK offerssome career-saving studiomanagement tips.As working environments move towards software,studios are spending time struggling with PC andMac-based products that can’t offer the reliabilityof older recording and editing tools. Traditional studiohardware tends to fail gracefully. If someone pours ahalf of rum and Coke across a few channels of the desk,the dead channels can be swapped out or ignored. If aworkstation dies, it will kill a session for hours and maytake the project with it.Fortunately it’s not difficult to bring computer hardwareup to professional standards of reliability. But to makethis possible, working practices have to become moreorganised, and spares and preventative maintenance costshave to be added to the operational budget.Not Just Stressed HardwareThe first requirement is clean and reliable power.Power cuts in Soho in 2006 did obvious damage to postschedules, and given that the UK’s generating capacityis becoming increasingly strained, power cuts may startto become more common, even in London. Elsewhere inthe UK brownouts happen regularly, especially in ruralareas, and both city and rural power has regular spikes ofover- and under-voltages. Larger facilities will have powercleaning or even their own generators. Smaller ones canadd them for minimal cost – even a budget plug-in surgesuppressor will help.But power can still be interrupted, causing crashes andlost data, and stressed hardware. Where there’s no onsitebackup power, a UPS – uninterruptible power supply – isessential. It’s easy to find very expensive UPS models, andonly slightly harder to find much cheaper ones which offerequivalent performance without the branding. These area good investment because they make higher back-upcapacities more accessible. A single workstation with a PCor Mac, external disks, audio converters, and monitors willneed a UPS rated to at least 2000VA. This gives a comfortablesafety margin for short brown outs and a chance tosave work and close down if the power goes off for anextended period.The Soft OptionEven with stable power, software is often notoriouslyunstable. It’s not possible to put together a rock solidsystem using ad hoc software. But a formal upgradeand software management policy can help preventproblems caused by bad updates or a proliferation oftrial versions. A good optional extra is a quality assurancetrial machine, which is kept away from front line workand used to evaluate updates, trials, and new versions.Updates sometimes cause more problems than they solve,and putting new versions into quarantine before allowingthem into sessions minimises problems. Software thatpasses basic checks for reliability can be added to a listand installed on the front line machines on a regularmonthly or quarterly update cycle. Once the workingenvironment is fixed, backup copies should be clonedovernight onto a couple of spare drives.This may seem like unnecessary extra work, but iteliminates feature creep, and guarantees there’s a solidversion to go back to in case of hardware or softwareproblems. It also means that the working version is alwaysthe most stable. An extra bonus is that keeping systemdisks lean also makes them faster and more efficient.Caddies are a very useful option here. System driveson caddies can be swapped in and out with minimaldisruption, so if a system disk fails it’s easy to swap in acopy and keep working. One gotcha is that by defaultprojects tend to save preferences and other information tothe system disk. So to make swap-ins possible, preferencesand associated data should either be set up before cloning,or saved to a different location. Getting this right can takesome tweaking of preference settings, but it’s worth it forthe peace of mind.RAID Vs. RedundancyWhile RAID is a popular option, it’s not the only choice.RAID 1 mirroring doubles disk requirements withoutnecessarily doubling reliability. Disks typically fail becauseof high operating temperatures and physical wear, and iftwo or more identical disks are used at the same time inthe same enclosure running at the same temperatures,they’re likely to fail within a short period of each other.So it’s a mistake to assume that RAID 1 makes failurehalf as likely – it doesn’t. RAID 1’s advantage is that twodisks are unlikely to fail at exactly the same time, soa session can continue without disk swapping. But assoon as one disk fails the other should immediatelybe considered suspect, and both should be changedas soon as possible. >52AUDIO MEDIA MAY 2008