Dorian Duerinckx
Independent artist, guitarist & producer
Practical notes for independent studio workflows
Never lose a session again. Build a bulletproof system for organizing, versioning, and backing up your growing audio library.
As your catalog grows, organization becomes survival. I’ve seen too many producers lose irreplaceable sessions because of poor naming or single-point-of-failure storage.
Here’s the exact system I’ve refined over years of managing large multitrack libraries.
Top level: Projects → Client/Artist Name → Project Name + Year → 01_Tracking, 02_Editing, 03_Mixing, 04_Mastering, Archives. Inside each stage folder I use date-prefixed subfolders (2026-01-15_v3_Stems). This makes finding anything trivial even years later.
I use simple but strict naming: ProjectName_v01_Master.wav, ProjectName_v02_Master.wav, etc. The “_FINAL” or “_DELIVERED” suffix goes only on files that have been sent to the client or platform. I also keep a text or Notion log of what changed in each version.
Three copies of important data, on two different media types, with one copy offsite. My current setup: working files on fast internal/NVMe SSD → mirrored to Synology NAS (RAID 1 or SHR) → automated nightly backup to external USB drives + selective cloud backup for critical masters.
A good archiving system is boring — and that’s the point. When you can find any session from three years ago in under 30 seconds and know it’s safely backed up, you can focus entirely on the creative work.