Q: Is it best to have a backup hard drive for projects?

Obviously can't speak for everyone. but it's definitely a good idea to diversify your storage locations for data that cannot be re-created, From the perspective of someone who has had three storage devices fail in less than a year, I am very happy that I had other copies of those data on other devices.

Since version 10.1, FCP X has performed automatic back-ups of libraries. By default, those are stored in the Movies folder of your Home directory. FWIW, that's where I keep mine, but they can be anywhere – except you want to ensure that they are not on the same drive as your working libraries. Otherwise, you are vulnerable to losing everything if that drive were to fail. (Note that these backup libraries do not contain any media. If opened, they will link to your media – assuming its location hasn't been changed. It's my practice to have at least two copies of the original media in two different physical  locations.

When a project is finished, it gets archived. There is a lot written about approaches to archiving. Here is a useful reference.

In addition to back-up strategies for FCP X. it is important to have a good system back-up plan – say, using Time Machine. That's another subject.

Good luck.

Russ

DedeJean wrote:

Do most of you store your projects on an external hard-drive and your internal hard-drive?

Backing up is a bit different from having a copy of stuff. A backup rather implies you can fire up the backup drive and get back to work where you left off. A copy could merely represent a camera archive or a shared version of one of your projects in the present library.

None of our media is or are stored locally. To comply with various Homeland Security rules and the data integrity policies of my company, we enjoy the services of our IT and server folks. They manage and maintain 30 days of backups of the material on our remote NFS server. It's a distinct luxury and we have had to resort to deep recovery only two times in three years. They also make complete backups of our MacPro drives (and any attached drives) nightly. We have had to do deep disaster recoveries for our Macs probably ten times in five years.

I will add that there are excellent articles on backing up scattered all around the web. Backing up is not just a question of having a copy of your stuff. Having a backup strategy means that you can go to Best Buy, get a new Mac, and rebuild your business in a few hours if a complete disaster occurs. If your backups are stored next to your computer, a flood or fire or burglary will take them out, too, and that's the same thing as not having a backup at all.