Guest contributor, Ciaran Robinson has already bought us Be Prepared With 6 Tips For Planning Your Session - Part 1 and part 2 as well as his excellent How To Coil A Cable video. Today Ciaran turns his attention to creating a secure backup of a Pro Tools project or anything for that matter, over to you Ciaran….
We’ve all heard the horror stories of multitracks finding their way on line because they were left on the studio drive, or perhaps you’ve been in the situation where once the band have a copy of the session files, they suddenly become difficult to get in touch with for payment….
Here’s a simple trick you can do with Disk Utility on a Mac, that will allow you to leave safety backups anyway you like, without fear of anyone else being able to access them:
First put your Pro Tools session inside a another folder
Next, open up Disk Utility you’ll find this in Applications-Utilities
Go to the File menu, and choose New-Disk Image From Folder
Navigate to the appropriate folder, and select “Image”
Chose read/write as the image format, turn on 128-bit AES encryption and click on Save.
Disk Utility will now ask you for a password. Enter and conform a password, and remember to uncheck the “Remember password in my keychain”.
Now sit back and relax while the image is processed. This might take a little while, depending upon your file size.
Once this is complete, you are left with a secure, password protected image of your Pro Tools session. You can leave this as a safety backup at the studio, with the band, and anywhere else you can think of (just don’t forget that the original file isn’t secured, so trash it before you go home!)
If you prefer Ciaran has produced a video to show how to do this.