It’s time to consider that another year is in the history books and a new year is upon us.

What better time to consider the mortality of our projects? You know what they say: It’s not a matter of IF, but only WHEN a hard drive will fail. This is a great time to grab a big hard drive and backup all your work.

Mass storage devices such as hard drives have never been more affordable and with all the holiday shopping sales out there, you can find some great deals. For online shoppers, there is a terrific website called boddit.com that aggregates all the best deals in one place.

You can find a 750GB hard drive for less than $100. Bear in mind that the hard drives you would purchase for audio and video playback need to have higher speed capabilities than a drive simply used for backups. That means that a nice 500GB or even 1TB drive can be had for a very low price to backup multiple playback and record drives. A drive with a USB 2.0 interface rather than FW400 or 800 will be cheaper and work well for this purpose. Since it’s only for backup, there’s no need to spring for the faster, more a/v-centric interface.

Backing your material up to the new drive is as simple as dragging and dropping. You may choose to use the “Save Copy In” command from the File menu within your Pro Tools sessions if you’re using audio spread across multiple drives or directories. If your sessions are self-contained, the drag and drop method will work perfectly. Regardless of what you choose to copy your data to or how you choose to copy it, the most important thing is that you have a backup of your material. The axiom to live by in the digital media world is this: If it doesn’t exist in three places, it doesn’t exist. We all live on the edge of failure with this equipment and the only solution we have to avoiding a catastrophic loss is to frequently backup our work. If you haven’t already been doing that with some serious diligence, then I think you know what your New Year’s resolution needs to be.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year and all other well wishes this season.

Here’s to a happy 2009!