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Automation Computer has external hard-drive and back-up program

J

joshzz

We have installed an external hard-drive with back up features on our system that runs our automation system.

I am wondering if this is a bad idea. Could it potentially slow down the automation system or cause other problems delay, lock-up etc?

Would appreciate your input. I believe if it is a problem for one automation system it would be a problem for all but I'm just guessing. Seeking your advice,

josh
 
Depends on how much horsepower the systems has, what you're running for automation (i.e., complexity) and interface to the external drive.

For the student station I built up I'm running both the master control and production rooms with P4's 1.8 GHz using a fairly light automation system (StationPlaylist). I'm sharing a partition on the master control system that has both the music and data over the network for editing and scheduling in production. I also have a Firewire interface for a backup drive as well since these things are too dated to have USB 2.0. I would think you should be able to get away with it depending on how many processing threads the backup program hijacks while in process. It's possible that unless the automation is set to a higher cpu priority you could potentially hit a snag.

Ideally, although I haven't had the time to pursue it, I want to move all the music to a dual drive raided server and have all the computers share the resources from there. At least running the backup from the server shouldn't make the on-air system bog or tank - something like that may be a way to go for you to, Josh.
 
It depends on how much overhead in processor power you have. We used to do exactly that with a P1.8 machine and Norton's Ghost. It worked, but it was not ideal. Norton when starting up would cause delays in the audio and it was a slow way to do a backup. The backup would start at 2a on a Monday morning and sometimes would not end until 7a, depending on how much new material we added to the audio database.

The best way to do it is to go to Geeks.com, get a refurbed rack server, put a Linux variant on it, then set your audio workstations to store and access the audio on the server, with a mirrored backup on your local workstation.

We maintain a second copy using "Second Copy" and an external HDD on the workstations. Second Copy makes a copy of anything new the minute it is added to the system. Triple redundancy.
 
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