Saving & Backing Up Workflow - Best Practices

The best practice is remarkably simple. When you start a project, create a folder for it and put a copy of all your original files into it (always work with copies - keep the original files securely somewhere else), and those are the files you work with. If you want to add a file, add a copy of it to the folder. That way you don't get the message, and you don't end up with multitple copies of the same thing.

How do you clean it up? It depends, but the general principle is that you make sure that the originals are in a folder on their own somewhere that doesn't have a session file associated with it, and then use the file searcher to look for duplicates. All you need is one copy in the appropriate session folder. The only exception to this is if you use the same file for different sessions/episodes - then you keep a copy of it in each folder.

The alternative to this is just to ignore the messages, on the grounds that Audition won't actually let you lose anything. Trouble with this is that you end up with messy session files, and if you move a single file that's used in more than one session, you have to relink it for all of the sessions it's used in. Also if you want to export a session with all of its files, it's a lot easier if they are all together in the same folder - obviously!

Another bit of good practice is to get yourself a large external disk drive (1TB goes a long way) and store your audio on that, and not on the C: drive of your computer. If it's a desktop model, then you may well be able to add one internally, but an external USB drive is fine. That way if anything goes wrong, or you need to use a different machine, it's relatively painless to get stuff onto it.