Archiving Projects - Best Practice?

Hey

How are you guys archiving completed projects? I have old projects of mine that are practically useless because I used instances of Kontakt 3 or other old plugins with version numbers in their names that I no longer have installed on my newer machine. Also some plugins are missing. Meaning half of the tracks don’t sound like they are supposed to.

I guess I could batch export all tracks but suppose I have 100 tracks, I’d end up with 100 times movie length worth of WAVs.

How do you do it? Bounce everything in place?

Thanks

I work mostly for post. (no vst instrument)
You can use the freeze tracks option for some tracks, but it’s not efficient on complex routing.
For post, i use a lot of stems (and sub stems) and i export all of them. I archive those stems + the session + some freeze tracks that i want with external process or special plugins. All of this on a NAS and 2 LTO tape. and then I drink a cold beer…

Hello,
In the world where storage is cheap and AEs are cheaper, everything is rendered dry and effected, and if some of the effects are combinations of things then multiple versions are rendered with each effect.
Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on the expected audio lifetime and your point of view, it’s a necessary part of file management. That’s what AEs are for.
H

What Hugh said. I also keep the MIDI tracks and VSTi’s in the project, but as you rightly stated, I seldom open an archived project older than three years without an error message about some missing VSTi or other.
If it’s a post job, I will also delete the video, which in my case is usually DNXHD that will just uselessly take up a lot of space.