organising MacPro hard drives

I have had a search of the site for some advice on this but haven't found an answer.
I am an enthusiastic illiterate amateur who has been using FCP on a MacBookPro. I now have a MacPro with 4 x 2TB hard drives. I would apprciate some help and advice on the best way to organise the OS, capture scratch, projects and files on the hard drives.
I am grateful for any help.
Thanks
Stephen

There's lots of ways to do it. Here's what I do

The OS and FCP and autosave vault all go on one drive. This is the main MacHD.

Then I have a drive called 'Clients' for small clients with jobs less than 500GB. Each client gets their own folder, which contains everything relating to their projects. Capture, graphics, contracts, music, whatever. There is also a copy of their project file(s) in here, but I back these up elsewhere as well.

Then I have a couple of clients who need a whole drive (or more) to themselves. These are charged out to the client and contain all their data. Because the drives can swap in and out so easily, some of my clients have drives sitting on the shelf for the next time I work for them.

Anything that would make me cry or swear to lose is backed up and stored externally.

So, whenever I start a new project, say for a new small client, I make a new folder for them on the Client drive, and everything goes in there, then gets imported into their FCP project. This also makes archiving a lot easier, cause you know everything is being saved when you archive the folders.

Thanks Jude.
I will get myself organised and back up everything.
Kind regards
Stephen

First never keep any type of files on the Main Macintosh HD. Just applications because this HD is already running OSX and the app's you are using as well as if it crashes all you lose is your programs and have to spend a little time reinstalling everything.

Always keep you working files on additional HDs. Now if those other drives you have are internal to your MacPro you can actually (Raid1) 2 of them together. Witch means it will show up as a single HD on your desktop but what is actually happening is the files you save on what appears to be a single HD is actually be written to both of them, so if one of the HDs fail you files are automaticly being backed up because the info is being written to both drives. And you simply get a new HD install it and rebuild the new one to copy back over your files to it. And this is all done with the "Disk Utility" app in your "Utilites" folder on the Mac HD.

If the drives you got are externals research to find out if those drives can set up as a Raid1.

Another choice is for example WesternDigital sells HDs that are 4terebytes with in one enclosure. So they have two 2 terabytes drives that can be set up as a Raid1 with the software that comes with them.

Now for organization of your files. Basically be extremely ORGANIZED. Have a main CLIENT FOLDER then with in that folder a MAIN PROJECT FOLDER for each new project you have for that particular client. Have a folder for your video, images, animation, audio etc... Then within each of the folders have additional folders for differenct genres of that particular media. Example "Images folder" have folder for logos, references, art type images, and so on.

Additionally with the FCP project media theres two ways you can go here:
1 Dedicate one central location for the project media for everytime a new FCP project is created.

2. For each new FCP project you create you can go into the "User Settings" and set the specific client project folder everytime so the capture scratch, audio cache, render folder etc are contained with in each project you create with is great for archiving purposes because everything involved with project is already in one folder.

The down side to this is, if you are working on multiple projects at one time you have to keep remembering to set the FCP project location before switching to a different project.