back up projects without copying media

In 10.09 I would copy my projects folder and any events that were modified over to another drive each night for my back up. When I updated my Projects & Events the resulting library is 1.8TB. I'd like to be able to back up the "sequences" which I have stored in the "Updated Projects" folder (or whatever that is) without re-copying all the media each time. Any suggestions? Thanks.

It is being done automatically for you. Just change the location in the Preferences. This backs up the Project database, plus all Events and Projects inside of it. Not media is backed up.

And the nice thing is you can do this backup of the Library information to Apple's iCloud.

So is the back up file the one that has "YYYYMMDD"_cst?

Yes, indicating time, date, and time zone of backup, in the file name.

So I'm thinking about using dropbox as my location so the backups appear on our other workstation, but so far I have 2.5GB of backups - how large will this grow?

Cool feature - thank you all for pointing it out.

So let's say I have two locations where I edit (A&B ). Each location has a copy of the same library. Can I have it save backups to the cloud at location A, then go to location B and restore from location A, edit for the day, go back to the location A and then restore from the last backup at location B?

If this does work, what would I do when I add media to the library? What's the best way to sync libraries at two locations?

Right now I'm just transporting a hard drive and it's annoying.

Karl,

If you are using the method described by Ben any individual Library Backup should not take up much space as it is only metadata. Of course if you store your entire backup folder on DropBox, in which a new backup file is created every 15 minutes or so, the total size will grow over time. If this is only for sharing purposes on different workstations you can store all your Library Backups locally and only put the latest ones on DropBox for sharing.

Julian,

Yes you can send your Library Backup files to the cloud and restore your project from the cloud on a different location.

When you work at different geographic locations (i.e. not sharing a central storage) and you add media at one location you will have to make sure the same media also gets to the other location, that's obvious. If the added media are stills, audio or small video clips you can also do this over the cloud, if the media are very large video clips you may have to find another way such as putting them on a transport drive. That's the case with any collaborative workflow.

- Ronny

ronny courtens wrote: When you work at different geographic locations (i.e. not sharing a central storage) and you add media at one location you will have to make sure the same media also gets to the other location, that's obvious. If the added media are stills, audio or small video clips you can also do this over the cloud, if the media are very large video clips you may have to find another way such as putting them on a transport drive. That's the case with any collaborative workflow.

- Ronny

SO I tried this as it is essentially the same thing I'm trying to accomplish - having the latest version of the edit on two different workstations. When I tried opening up from the backup from the other machine all of the files were offline & I cannot figure out how to link them to library that contains them?

When you share projects between different workstations it is best to keep your media external (i.e. out of the Libraries). Either you use a shared storage network, or both workstations must have the same media physically stored on their own drives.

Although sending Library Backup files between workstations is theoretically possible I would not encourage this. It is not officially supported from within FCPX and there are other and better project sharing solutions that don't involve messing around in the Library structure. If you just want to have the latest version of your edit on different workstations, exporting an XML is a much better workflow and XML files are really small. But there are many other options as well.

Here's a detailed overview of the many ways you can share FCPX media and projects across different workstations: www.10dot1.co.uk/content/FCPXInASharedEnvironment_FINAL.pdf

- Ronny

Wow that's a great PDF - thanks. I have already done a lot of editing within the library that is a conversion from about 44 events that have media in them (they are converted FCP7 projects)

I still have all of that media (says old projects/old events or something like that)

Is there anyway you can think of to link the new projects and edited converted projects I've created since the 10.09-10.1 conversion to the old media so I can manage the media manually?