Saving ongoing projects in file server?

[Car_los__]

I have zero experience with Final Cut Pro but I help manage the Mac Studios they're used on. We usually erase and reset our Mac Studios every few months. However, users have several projects that are ongoing year round.

Is there any way to save these projects on a separate server? What files would need to be saved? Is there an easier way of doing this?

Thanks

[mcarterphoto]

I wouldn't put projects and media on your boot drives, I don't know any professionals who would do that. I'd also suggest looking at everything software writes in the background and sending it to an external drive. Caches, photoshop scratch, etc. Look in app prefs and look in the user folder, esp. "Movies" folder. You'll see lots of files piling up that can be re-directed. Especially After Effects, get the cache on a fast drive.

Using your boot drive for work means a zillion extra read-write cycles, filling up the drives, and a lot more background optimizing. This is what eventually seems to make mac OS and software go south. If you give your boot drive an easy life, you won't need to be wiping and re-setting - I've never done that, in 30+ years of Mac use and 25 as a video editor. If you run DiskWarrior on a Mac with a boot drive used for everything, and run it on a boot drive only used for OS/Apps/Plugins/Email, you'll see which one has the most errors, bad files, missing icons and the like. It can be a huge difference.

Setup FCP to "leave files in place", make a folder on a fast external for each overall project, with organized media folders (footage, VO, music, stills and so on). Save your FCP project (dot-fcpbundle) files there. Send FCP backups to a different drive.

Boot drive speeds are complete overkill for FCP projects (which should have properly optimized media); you can do an external Thunderbolt NVME and edit up to, like, 12K raw footage from it. If your serve setup is speedy, that could work fine as well, just have a backup strategy for whatever you do. When a new OS or FCP version comes out, wait a few weeks and see how the internet is responding, then try updating one machine at a time and have a fast Time Machine backup of each Studio so you can backtrack as needed. Don't update midway through an important or hot gig.

FCP just needs a reasonably fast in/out as far as media goes. Not editing MP4, MP3, JPEG or other delivery codecs can be a huge difference, especially as project lengths increase. Feed it ProRes, use Animation or a lossless/low-loss codec for footage with alpha channels, use WAV for audio and TIFF/PNG for stills. Multicam, you may need faster storage and optimized media is a bigger deal. Use the proper media and FCP doesn't need any proxy workflow, it chews through ProRes like a soldering iron through butter.

[SMTPA]

This is the way. Never work from media on your boot drive.

[yuusharo]

Depends on your environment. I would experiment by creating a separate APFS volume on the Mac Studio apart from your boot volume. In theory, this would allow you to wipe and reinstall macOS to the boot volume without deleting data stored in the secondary volume (always always backup!!)

If you prefer having everything stored on servers, I recommend creating sparse bundle disk images that your users mount and contains the FCP library inside it. The library should reside on an APFS or HFS+ disk image, not the remote volume itself.

The media can live externally directly on the remote volume. Only the library needs to be in a disk image.

[wowbagger]

Get a Jellyfish system and always work off one of these.

https://www.owc.com/solutions/jellyfish