I am often asked how is my machine set up for editing. First of all, there are several options out there, so one set up is not better than another, as long as the basics are covered.  I am a true believer that you do not have to reinstall the operating system and then liquid every time Liquid comes out - if you have a solid system running in the first place.  And once you have a solid system, keeping a backup of that drive allows you to reinstall that system quickly in case something goes wrong is well worth the effort.

 I have a Dell Workstation with three drives in it (all internal). One is a 120 gig SATA (drive that came with machine), and the other two are EIDE drives 80 gig (system) and 160 gig (media).  I also have two DVD recorders in my system. And I have additional 160 gig drives as well as an additional 80 gig drive.  By default, most systems boot directly to the SATA drive unless there is user intervention into the computer's boot up process.

Although I don't have room in my chasis to have 3 large open bays on the front of my machine, I recommend that chasis so that you can have 2 DVD's and a removable drive bay all up front.  Guess if I used a usb DVD recorder I  could open one of those bays for a removable bay.  I have removable's in other machines and they are very nice.

I actually have two boot drives with OS XP pro on them – my 120 gig SATA drive (that I generally use as my render drive if I don’t boot to it) and my 80 gig eide drive – which I do boot to most the time.  To boot with the dell, I have to press F12 at time of setup to access Dell's multiboot CMOS program. If I don't press F12 - it automatically boots to the SATA drive.

My sata drive just has OS and liquid – plus a render folder. No network, no other programs.  My ide boot drive  has OS, network + web access, and all my programs – including Liquid 562 and 611. They do exist on the same drive with no issues.

I always boot to the ide (cause I believe liquid should run with everything and don’t really buy into "liquid only" systems - but that is me). When something seems like it is not working with liquid (of course that is learned from experience), I first cold boot back to ide.  If issue is still there, I boot to SATA and see what happens.  So far all has worked well on IDE boot and I have not found any issues with Liquid on the multi-program IDE drive that is fixed by the single Liqud program on the SATA drive.  But I do  like having the backup drive option to check things out - and it is a great option if I am on a tight deadline.

I also image my IDE drive to a backup drive of the same size using Acronis True Image. I try to do that every 2 or 3 months (more often if possible)– and usually also before I install a major software upgrade. And I have had to use the backup image a few times. I image the whole drive - so I can just pop in that drive and I am off and running.  My email is not up to date - and I would be missing any installs since the last image - but at least I am up and running quickly.

I store all my project files on the media drive, which therefore has project and media files. A good backup process would be to store a backup of working the projects either the render drive or the boot drive.  They are not that big.  I just figure the biggest chance of losing a drive is the OS drive - which has proven true for me.

Since I do not have a removable bay drive  (I would use this for my 160 gig media drives as well as my 80 gig system backup drive), I just leave my case open a bit and change out the drives manually.  Takes about as much time as doing the removable bays, but  a bit less convenient.