having just read about the catastrophic loss of data that happened to marino recently.............. could some one or some bodies that feel they have data management under control please leave some tips for me and fellow ampers to help them get their data management under control.....

I am useless at it.........

I use cubase sx and have no real understanding of what goes on when i set up a new project....and I set them up without a lot of thought all the time.....so i end up with loads of audio files tagged with the same name ......every song has audio files tagged the same.......as i record them

The more projects I do the worse the problem potentially/actually gets

so here is a real call out .....

HELP !!!! with file management. And bearing in mind Marinos loss of everything DATA TOO

Please

The fish

must admit im excited to see the advice !!!!

Tx...Swordy....Yes some ideas can help specially for peeps with no money to spend on extra drives like me...

Maybe everyone is as chaotic as you Swordy !! 

Reading your post it sounds like you simply need to be more organised.
Make a folder , call it "my Music Projects" in that folder make lots of folders , call them your songs names , put every thing connected / related to each song in it's appropriate folder.

But Cubase offers to save a new song in a folder with a 'song name'.audio (empty) folder in it? it uses this folder for the audio channels you open in the song , it also saves it's own version of Rex / edited audio files to this folder......well mine does anyway!
Any other files you use you can copy / move to the 'song folder', when I am reasonably happy that I know which samples are to be used in the song I move the samples to the 'song folder' (in my case D:Cubase'song name') , start up Cubase , it looks for the missing audio files , click 'search automaticaly' , and it should go straight to the 'song folder' (with the 'song name'.audio folder in it), if it doesn't, do the honours and point it to the right folder, cancel the audio files you dont need and purge them from the audio pool once the program is open. The wave forms have question marks on them in the Audio Pool.
I put my .fxp and .fxb files in a folder in with the appropriate instrument , naming each file after the song they belong to, this is not the best way I know because I end up having to back up my whole vst plugins folder, another way would be to put them straight in the 'song folder' but then you would have to name them after the instrument they belong to.
Cubase also automatically creates and saves it's own .all , .arr and .ovw files in the designated 'song folder', the one with the empty 'song name'.audio folder in it. So save the rest of the songs components in there to.

Was that exiting enough?

HI KINGS

yep thats exciting enough for me.......

thank you so much for spending the time to answer with such a helpful reply...

its gonna take me some time to get organised as ive literally got hundreds of redudant wav files to find and assign

i think i need to get one system(that works) and stick to it........lots of post it notes stuck around the DAW to remind me what to do.....!!!!

i will keep u posted as to how the re-organisation goes.....

the files go back for years and are scattered across my hard drive.....

Its a bit of a reflection of life dont you think??

BIG THANK ..NO Massive THANK YOU...

Swordfish

OK! So it it as I guessed ! lol
You'll have to open every song , like someone suggested to Marino, but in your case you'll be looking to gather all of your songs 'components'.
So you have wave files scattered everywhere ? Make a partition.........can you make a partition ? (I dont mean to be patronising ) 
Make a partition , call it ?? "Samples", or make a folder in your my Documents and call it 'Samples'.
At this point you can take your time finding and moving all your waves into the new 'samples' folder , making sub folders called 'effects, vocals, drums, bass, synth, MP3s etc (I keep my mp3 sample collections in one folder, leaving only wavs as the rest of my samples)' , you can call your folders anything you like , this is just how I categorise mine.
If your samples are truly everywhere around your PC try using the search ' **.wav ' on your C: (and D:,E: etc), this will find all your wav files , now you could just 'cut and paste' all wavs in the search results into your new folder/partition, to be sorted out into folders later, the only problem doing it this way is that you'll also move all the system sounds too as well as those that come with individual programs! Unless you de-select them.

To find all your songs , I doubt they are all still listed in the last opened songs, so you can make a system wide search for **.all and **.arr, then open them in Cubase and suss out where everything is!
I take it you know what I mean with .fxb and fxp ?

Folders are wonderful things, you can have as many as you like, as long as you call them the right thing and put them in the right place they can do wonders while organising ones system!   

As for my time Swordy.....I enjoy sitting down with T and J and spending some time
with some friends of mine.