I know this has been brought up many times before, and with good reason. We all have, somewhere on our hard drives, a huge folder full of hundreds of unknown audio files in folders “Untitled-53”, “Untitled-54”, etc. Problem is that these are not all scratch files, some legitimately belong to projects which are stored somewhere else on the hard drive, where most people think their projects have been saved.
Every user’s scenario is different (which is why it’s good to have a simpler file management to begin with), but here is mine. I have a template set up for film scoring, with clicks setup the way I need them, some tracks/stem busses, etc. I open this template and add a video. Now I go to save it as “ThisMovie 1M1”. Well guess what, unless I do “Backup Project”, any audio files that I record in the future will be saved to a weird “untitled-56” folder or wherever else. It just simply doesn’t make sense. In the entire history of computing, “Save As…” and “Backup” have two completely different meanings, which are being muddied with Cubase. It only makes sense to at least have a checkbox when saving as, which says something like “move audio pool with save” or something like that. Logic Pro actually has the best way of doing it by automatically saving the audio files within the session file. This of course is not possible on Windows, but the same idea could work with folders. Automatically move the pool to wherever the save as is, and allow setting the pool to a different folder at will. This “backup project” nonsense is just confusing and there isn’t really a legitimate reason to leave out the ability to save the pool with the save as. The only time a person should be backing up a project is when they’re dropping it onto another disk to take to another studio, or when they’re actually doing a backup, aka something they hope to never touch again because that’s what a backup is.