Frame One highly recommends regularly maintaining Avid projects, bins, and the Unity Attic to keep your team's project data safe. Good maintenance practices help your team avoid worst-case scenarios with project data. Anyone collaborating on shared storage can benefit from understanding these principles and keeping your team honest about regular maintenance.
Keep Ingest and Edit Projects Separate and Tidy
Each Avid workstation regularly searches for changes to bins of its open project. The more bins in a project, the greater the indexing task. We recommend the following when segmenting your assets into different projects and bins:
- For episodic content, use one project per episode and a separate project for media ingestion.
- For films, use an editing project and a separate project for media ingestion.
- Avoid dividing content excessively into separate bins and folders. For content like archival, use metadata and bin columns to segment data instead of separate bins.
- Avoid accessing bins from other projects. Copy bins from one project into another instead. If you do access external bins, remove them from the "Nexus Bins" folder when you are done (The folder is located at the bottom of the project window).
- Never permit bins to exceed 150 MB. Archive old sequences to "archive" bins and keep them closed when not in use.
- Delete bins that are no longer necessary and regularly clear the trash.
Cycling Out the Unity Attic
Avid creates a Unity Attic folder on the root of the project's drive for bin backups for your entire team. Though the attic is a great tool, it is not infallible. We recommend assistant editors cycle out the attic out once per week to keep bin saving quick and reliable.
Recreating the attic is easy! It's not necessary to have everyone sign out of the project before cycling the Attic out. Simply rename the Unity Attic with a useful suffix (e.g. "Unity Attic_YYYYMMDD") and the next time a background bin save occurs (on any workstation) Avid will create a new Unity Attic. Old Unity Attic folders should be retained until no longer needed by your team.
Regular Project Backups
Don't rely exclusively on the Attic alone for your daily bin snapshots. We recommend assistant editors compress, date, and archive the project folder daily to at least two locations (e.g., a backup folder and the Media Shuttle.)
If you have any questions about these processes, don't hesitate to reach out to Frame One Support!