#36127 External Hard Drive

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Hey Peet –

I talked with Grant about an external hard drive and he’s on board with it. He asked that I have you order it. Would you mind? I was looking at a 4 TB one, but I’ll let you be the judge of that, of course.

Thanks,

Chelsea

[embedded image](http://missoulapartnership.com/)

Chelsea Rabideau([she/her/hers](https://pronouns.org/))

Communications Director

Missoula Economic Partnership

500 N. Higgins Ave, Suite 300

Missoula, MT 59802

missoulapartnership.com

[email protected]

P: 406.861.5695

Chelsea,

I'd like to make sure we're solving the problem you need addressed here. An external drive may be the perfect solution, but we'd need to ensure that we're getting the correct, size, speed, and type and that using the drive solves the issue and doesn't create any new obstacles for you.

What is the use case for the drive? External video production and workflow? Local archive? Will it be transported frequently? Would the data on the drive be considered ephemeral, or would we need a backup strategy?

You currently have ~320GB of free space on your computer (and that should increase when we wipe any data remnants of Grant). Do your active projects often exceed that size?

Since this is response to the issues you had the other day with the Premiere project, have you had the chance to fully download that project with "Always Keep on This Device", move the project outside of your OneDrive/SharePoint (perhaps to your "Movies" folder or another folder that's not Desktop, Documents or in OneDrive) and then test it?

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If it fails after being downloaded fully and moved, it's possible that project is corrupt after whatever may have happened to it. For testing, is it possible to recreate it or something like it outside of your OneDrive?

Cheers.Peet

Hi Peet,

This is in response to ongoing difficulties with video production in general beyond the latest issue. I have not had any time to go back and investigate that file, I’ve had to move onto the work in front of me. With the new laptop, I was able to open the original file…that’s as far as I got before being pulled into other work. I know we’re trying to find the best/right solution, but some of this is just far enough outside of my area of expertise that to dig into it forensically would take more bandwidth than I have to spare.

In my experience, working with an external hard drive has been ideal for speed and storage. Additionally, it seemed like that’s what you were telling me was a solution. In response to your questions, I can tell you what I need and what I struggle with – as far as the right piece of equipment and potential backup strategy, you’ll have to tell me.

Beyond the latest issue, I struggled with program performance in the past hindering my ability to effectively produce and store the video content we’re moving toward on a more regular basis – by content I mean the individual files that make up a project, the project itself, and the final exported video (as well as some minor graphics). All of which needs to be kept in perpetuity.

The issues I’ve had in the past:

- Premiere Pro and/or Media Encoder performing extremely slowly or crashing mid-project when media and project files were stored directly on laptop.
- File corruption or inaccessibility (for whatever reason), and often slow performance when media and project files were stored on OneDrive.
- General slow performance with all the programs on my computer (granted, I believe this was an issue with my former laptop)

If I am going to continue producing video content (I am), I will need to be able to store video clips and projects long-term. Often, I will create a video, upload it to YouTube, and then a year or more later, I need the video file to add to a presentation (this is an example, but there are many other reasons I’d like to have access to the original project files. Especially when we lose access to our YouTube/Google account). This latest issue is not the first time I have been unable to go back and pull an old video from OneDrive.

While an individual project does not exceed 320GB, the collection of projects will. I don’t think storing the projects and video files on my desktop is a long-term solution as I shoot a considerable amount of video for a single project, and I anticipate that, over time, storing on my desktop will become untenable. As I mentioned, each project and the clips that make them up may be used for future purposes and therefore need to be stored in a way that I can easily and quickly access them. Additionally, on occasion we work with an outside video production company, and they offer us the (sizeable) unedited clips. I’d like to be able to have and store those.

As I work from both home and the office every week, the hard drive would likely be transported fairly frequently when I’m actively working on a project or presentation.

Chelsea Rabideau

Communications Director

Missoula Economic Partnership

From: Artichoke Support - Peet <[email protected]>
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025 at 12:42 PM
To: Chelsea Rabideau <[email protected]>
Subject: External Hard Drive (message id: 100471627)

Chelsea,

Thanks for the detailed reply.

As far as performance issues with local (non-synced) files, I don’t expect you’ll see those going forward with the M3 Pro MacBook Pro. If you do experience similar slowdowns or crashes while working entirely outside of OneDrive or SharePoint, please let me know so we can pinpoint the specific cause.

I am concerned about the file corruption you’ve experienced, but from your description, it sounds like most of the instability has been tied to working directly out of OneDrive-synced directories. Depending on how your storage is configured, OneDrive may automatically offload file data and leave only cloud-based placeholders. When that happens, large clips (e.g., a 10 GB video) have to be re-downloaded in real time as Premiere tries to access them—causing freezes, incomplete writes, or even corruption.

Going forward, no active project or media files should be stored inside any OneDrive- or SharePoint-synced folders, including:
/Users/crabideau/Desktop
/Users/crabideau/Documents
/Users/crabideau/OneDrive – MEP
/Users/crabideau/MEP (if SharePoint is syncing locally)

There are three separate issues we should address:

-

Workflow stability:
To avoid the sync and performance issues you’ve seen, I recommend that you keep all active Premiere projects and related media in a local directory on your Mac, outside of any OneDrive or SharePoint sync path. The simplest approach is to create a dedicated folder directly under your user directory, such as:
/Users/crabideau/[ProjectsDirectory]

You can name this folder whatever makes sense for your organization (for example, “VideoProjects” or “PremiereProjects”). Each new project can have its own subfolder within it to hold the Premiere project file, media, and export folders. Working from this local path ensures that Premiere always has direct, uninterrupted access to large media files and cache data, eliminating the lag, freezing, and corruption that can occur when those files are stored in sync-enabled locations.

-
Live project backup:
To protect your in-progress work without interfering with performance, we can have CrashPlan automatically back up your entire home folder, including your project directory. This provides continuous versioned backups of your local files without the sync-related problems caused by OneDrive. I’ll just need a short session with your computer to confirm that CrashPlan is running properly and that all the relevant folders (especially your project directory) are included and backing up as expected.

-

Long-term archival:
For completed projects that no longer need to be actively edited, the first solution is to use your existing OneDrive storage. You currently have around 1 TB of available space, which is ideal for archival use. We can create a dedicated archive directory at:
/Users/crabideau/OneDrive – MEP/Projects/Archives
Once a project is finished, its full folder (project file, raw media, and exports) can be moved here for long-term storage. These archived projects will remain accessible through OneDrive but won’t impact day-to-day performance since they’re no longer being edited.

The final, published video files from those projects — the actual deliverables — should continue to live in the appropriate location within your SharePoint storage, where they can be accessed and shared by the rest of MEP as needed.

If you agree and could try working with this setup first, you can start by testing the workflow outlined above using your MacBook Pro’s internal storage. If it turns out that additional fast local space is needed for active projects, I can then incorporate a new Thunderbolt SSD into the setup and design a process to ensure any live projects on that drive are automatically backed up alongside your home folder.

Thanks.Peet

Hi Peet –

Thanks for the thoughtful processes. I am going to try my best to implement these strategies. Admittedly, some of this is a bit over my head, but I think once I put it in practice, I’ll understand it a bit better. I may be back in touch re: the archival process and backup strategies. If I run into issues, I’ll let you know. If you need to do something to my computer, let me know.

Thanks,

Chelsea Rabideau

Communications Director

Missoula Economic Partnership

From: Artichoke Support - Peet <[email protected]>
Date: Wednesday, October 22, 2025 at 3:31 PM
To: Chelsea Rabideau <[email protected]>
Subject: External Hard Drive (message id: 100471627)

Chelsea,

If you can make sure you can log into https://console.us2.crashplan.com/ I can enable the CrashPlan backup with a quick session on your computer.

Cheers.Peet

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