Save or Save As

[brandon]

I understand that if you just 'Save' a project each time you close it etc. you will amass a load of unnecessary and unwanted audio stored somewhere on your PC. And the only way to avoid this is to 'Save As' each time. This is inconvenient for a number of reasons.  Is this really the case and if so does anyone know why?

[Nigel Mackay]

There has to be a good reason to use Save As. For example, you want to do your piece of music in straight 4/4 time, and you also want to do it with a swing 6/8 time.
Every time you use Save As you save everything, and are wasting even more space. And have all these "old" copies of the project to delete using File Explorer.

What you would do:
You get all your notes in using Straight44 in the name.
Then you use Save As using Swing68 in the name.
Now you can modify.

Instead:
Use Utilities -> Clean Audio Folder.
It defaults to the correct folder.
Click Find.
It Finds all the "replaced" audio files from the tracks.
The files are named after the track names and are numbered sequentially.
You can select individual tracks and use Play to listen in case you are worried about a version of a specific track.
You can delete them one-by-one after checking or whatever.
You can delete all the old copies in one go.
 

[brandon]

To clarify - if i dont want to use up more space or have a project with different time sigs (for example) is it simply best to just 'save' the project when am closing it?

[Nigel Mackay]

Correct.

[mark skinner]

 After I have exported a final mix of a completely finished project , I use the clean audio folder in utilities, as Nigel suggested , to get rid of all the unused wav files. I did a 5 min. song once that took me nearly 3 months with a LOT of retakes. The audio folder for this song was 7 gigs! After cleaning it was 480 mb. This will also save you a Lot of room when you "back up" a project to a flash or external drive.      mark

[brandon]

1 hour ago, mark skinner said:

 After I have exported a final mix of a completely finished project , I use the clean audio folder in utilities, as Nigel suggested , to get rid of all the unused wav files. I did a 5 min. song once that took me nearly 3 months with a LOT of retakes. The audio folder for this song was 7 gigs! After cleaning it was 480 mb. This will also save you a Lot of room when you "back up" a project to a flash or external drive.      mark

Thank you both.

[treesha]

I always use save as and save the newest version only on my computer and the numerous ones i have saved as on an external drive. I like save as because it does keep everything in one place and sometimes i have opened a project to find audio missing dialogue box for some unknown reason so i have its duplicate. I also have at times needed to go back some versions backwards because over time i decide the first bass part was better after all. Then when its all said and done i delete the files off the drive and clean audio folder. Ive made some mistakes or changes of mind that make me glad i did save as quite a few times. I use the date for the name. Just how i have done it for a long time now.  

[John Vere]

I keep projects in folders sort of like an album. The are either band names, client names or things like backing tracks and Originals. These are also always dated in the file name. “ Orginals 2016”. 
 

all folders start life on my working data drive as time goes by I have probably backed them up a few times to at least 2 or 3 external drives. 

i never delete anything. Why bother storage is cheap. 
 

I only use save as to copy a project to a different local folder. For song variations I use mix recall. 

[brandon]

23 hours ago, treesha said:

I always use save as and save the newest version only on my computer and the numerous ones i have saved as on an external drive. I like save as because it does keep everything in one place and sometimes i have opened a project to find audio missing dialogue box for some unknown reason so i have its duplicate. I also have at times needed to go back some versions backwards because over time i decide the first bass part was better after all. Then when its all said and done i delete the files off the drive and clean audio folder. Ive made some mistakes or changes of mind that make me glad i did save as quite a few times. I use the date for the name. Just how i have done it for a long time now.  

That's always a good reason to 'save as' - as a back up. The alternative is to do an actual back up of the file elsewhere. The best piece of advice I came across many years ago (30 years maybe) with regards to backing up was to think how you would feel if you 'lost' a particular file (through whatever reason) and then decide whether it was worth backing up or not. In music terms the answer would be to back up as often as possible.