PrE 9 external hard drives

Hi, I'm new to the forum.
I have recently bought PrE 9 and think it's fantastic, but I have a few questions.
I have an external 1 TB hard drive (NTFS,) and have been storing my unedited videos on it, and I would like to keep my edited ones there too... as I have little to no experience of editing and using PrE, I want to know exactly which files I should be storing where? Any advice would be very welcome.
Also I had a big problem installing a program recently, and the long and short of it was that I had to re-image Windows 7, ouch, so I am very keen to get it right first time with PrE, in terms of file storage.
Any other tips as to good practice would be helpful too.
many thanks,
brushman

Welcome to the forum.
First, take a look at this ARTICLE on external HDD's.
As for a workflow, one has to decide exactly what they want to do, and how they want to do it. Here are some thoughts, based on my general workflow, using my laptop (only computer with PrE on it) and external HDD's. Some of this will probably not apply, as I migrate my Projects between my laptop, and a workstation.
I create the Project folder structure on an external (FW-800 in my case, but eSATA would be even better). Under that structure, I create the sub-folders, that I anticipate needing. These will be Videos, Audio, SFX, Still Images, Finished AVI's, Finished AC3's, Titles, etc., and then I will Copy my Assets to the appropriate sub-folder. The originals stay on my NAS unit for safety. All stills will have been worked on in PS, and Scaled to the Frame Size of the Project, regardless of the resolution of the originals.
I locate my Scratch Disks (w/ my Media Cache) with the setting (Edit>Preferences>Scratch Disks), Same as Project. Everything needed is now under the folder structure of my Project, and I can edit to/from the external, and move it between computers. Note: each of my externals has its drive letter set in the OS of each computer, so that it is unique, and is always seen as, say my Z:\ drive, regardless of when/where I plug in the external, and when I turn it on in the process.
I edit, and output/Share/Export to the Finished AVI, or Finished AC3 (Audio) folders, so all is still contained and under the Project's folder structure.
When I am done editing, and everything has checked out, I will use the Archiver to archive my Project to another external HDD for safe-keeping. I test the archived Project. If all works fine, I just Delete the Project's root folder, deleting all of the sub-folders and their contents. I always do the archive with the full Video Assets, so if I need to do a major re-edit, all of the footage is still available to me. This means larger files, but that would save me having to re-Import, or re-Capture footage.
If one is manually doing a Copy of their Project, the Media Cache files are NOT needed. These will be the Render files (AVI's in my case), the CFA (Conformed Audio) and the PEK (Waveform Display) files. PrE will recreate all of those, if they are needed later on.
That is how I do it, and so far, have never experienced an issue.
Hope that this helps, and good luck,
Hunt

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