Tutorials Video

Resolve Keeps Your Project in a Database, Not a File

By Infinite Creation · Intermediate · ~12 min

Overview

Almost everything difficult about the first month in Resolve comes from one fact: there is no project file. Premiere writes a .prproj next to your footage, and every habit you have about backup, handover, versioning and recovery is built on that file existing. Resolve stores projects in a project library, which is a database. Nothing in the Project Manager produces a file you can email. This page is about what to do instead, and it is the page most worth reading before you lose something.

What You Need

Resolve installed, with at least one project made, even an empty one
A backup destination that is not the machine you edit on
Ten minutes, once, before you have anything you would miss

Steps

Find out where your projects actually live

Open the Project Manager and look at the project libraries sidebar. Every project you have made sits inside a library, and that library is a database on disk rather than a folder of files you can browse meaningfully. The manual covers this under Managing Projects and Project Libraries. Knowing the location is the first step, because everything else depends on it.

Export the project, which is not the same as saving it

Right clicking a project in the Project Manager offers an export, which writes a .drp file. That is the thing you send to someone, archive with the job, or keep alongside the footage. It is a deliberate act and it does not happen because you saved. An editor who has been working for a week and never exported has one copy of that work, inside a database, on one machine.

Set up library level backup as well

Libraries can be duplicated for backup or iteration, which protects against a different failure than exporting a single project does. Exporting protects one job. Duplicating the library protects the whole history. Do both, because they fail in different ways: a corrupt library takes everything, and a mistake inside one project takes only that.

Treat handover as an export, always

There is no equivalent of sending someone a project file and a drive and trusting it to open. Handover means exporting the project, and where the other party is not on Resolve it means an interchange format instead. Deciding which of those you are doing, before the job starts, avoids the conversation where two people discover they meant different things.

Learn the difference between optimised media and proxies, because they are both here

Premiere has proxies. Resolve has proxies and optimised media, and they are separate systems with separate settings. The manual documents proxy media resolution and format alongside optimised media resolution and format as distinct preferences. In practice optimised media is generated and managed by Resolve for its own performance, while proxies behave more like the workflow you know. Configuring one when you meant the other produces a large amount of disk usage and no improvement.

Decide your versioning convention before you need it

With no file to duplicate, the habit of saving a new version by copying the project file does not exist. Resolve keeps its own version history inside the library, and you can duplicate a project or a timeline. Pick one and be consistent. The failure mode is not losing work. It is being unable to say which of six timelines was the one the client approved.

Pro Tips

Export the project at the end of every working day for the first month. It is a few seconds and it rebuilds the safety habit the missing project file took away.
A .drp export carries the project, not the media. It is not an archive on its own.
If you work across two machines, decide early whether you are moving exports around or running a shared library. Doing both by accident is how versions diverge.

Knowledge Base

Background and Detail

The failure modes are predictable, which means they are preventable.

The three ways people lose work in the first month

None of them is a crash. The first is having a single library on a single machine with no export, so one disk failure takes every project. The second is assuming that because the work was saved it was also archived, and discovering at the end of a job that there is no file to hand over. The third is version confusion: several timelines, none clearly marked, and no file naming convention to fall back on because there are no files. All three are habits rather than accidents, and all three are fixed by exporting at the end of a day.

Why optimised media and proxies both exist

Having two systems that appear to do the same thing is a genuine source of confusion, and the manual documents them as separate settings rather than as one feature with two names. The practical way to hold it is that optimised media is Resolve solving its own playback problem on your machine, while proxies are a workflow you manage deliberately, usually because the media is going somewhere else or someone else is cutting it. Configuring both without deciding which problem you are solving mostly produces disk usage.

Where This Fits

The project database holds the edit, and Video Production Fundamentals covers the stages that fill it.

FAQ

Q: Where is my project file?
A: There is not one. Projects live inside a project library, which is a database. The nearest equivalent is a .drp file, and it only exists when you export one.

Q: If Resolve crashes, is my work gone?
A: No. Work is committed to the library as you go, and Resolve keeps backups of its own. The risk is not a crash mid-edit. It is having only one copy of the library.

Q: Can I just keep everything in one library?
A: You can, and many people do. Understand that you have then put every job you have ever done in one container, and back it up accordingly.

Vocabulary

Project library Where Resolve keeps every project, as a database on disk rather than a folder of files you can usefully browse. It takes the place of the project file you would otherwise copy. A library can be duplicated, which protects every job inside it at once.

.drp The file Resolve writes when you export a project from the Project Manager. It is what you archive, hand over or keep beside the footage. It carries the project but not the media, and it only exists if you deliberately export one.

Optimised media Media that Resolve generates and manages for its own playback performance, with resolution and format set in their own preferences. It is a separate system from proxy media, and configuring it when you meant proxies uses a lot of disk for no improvement.

Proxy media Stand in files for editing, configured with resolution and format preferences of their own, kept apart from the settings for optimised media. Proxies in Resolve behave more like the proxy workflow a Premiere editor already knows. The two systems do not share settings.

Sources

Behaviour described here is from the vendor manual, read directly. Checked 2026-09-11.

Blackmagic Design, DaVinci Resolve 21 Reference Manual. Read 2026-09-11. Chapter 3, Managing Projects and Project Libraries, page 85, covers connecting to and duplicating local project libraries, and states that local project libraries can be duplicated in the same database for backup or iteration. Page 147, Optimized Media and Render Cache, documents proxy media resolution and format as settings separate from optimized media resolution and format.