Backing up data

[TheNobleNemesis]

Is backing up my data as important as I hear it is? I hear an earful of "back up your hard drive every day" on a daily basis. Should I start backing things up? What would be a good solution for this?

[jestermgee]

I would say you only need a backup if you don't want to loose your shit.

If you have any data that is irreplaceable (Music tracks, special samples, videos, photos, documents etc) and you trust it in only 1 place then you are just waiting for the day that you cannot access it.

I have 3 hard drives from friends/customers right now that are unreadable and all the tools I throw at them do not get the data off the drive. They are gone along with all the home videos and photos the people had on them. I too have had at least half a dozen hard drives and countless floppy disks, rom disks and even USB sticks become unreadable in my 25 years of using computers. I have lost next to nothing though because of the lessons I learned years ago. I watched my brother give up music because he lost over 50 projects and all his sample collection in a computer HDD crash. Just lost interest after that.

There are a load of backup solutions available and it is a hard one to suggest what is best. I personally programmed my own solution which runs on my central windows server. The solution I have is using simple batch files and "Robocopy" running in a loop on the server. It polls for all my machines every 5 minutes and as soon as a PC is online it copies the info I have set from PC to server. It then does not make a copy until the machines are offline/online again. I don't even just trust that so I have a HDD dock station where I clip in external drives which have all the data on the server backed up too. In the event of a flood or fire I grab a pelican case with all my drives and my digital life is complete. Overkill? Not when I trust so much of my life to drives and disks.

[antarktika]

Like Jestermgee said, backing up your data isn't that important... if you are ready to face losing all of it when your drive dies (and it will)

[eddiex]

yes! back up! back up! back up!!! a crash will happen when you least expect it and take it from me, it really sucks when it does!

[re:dream]

Just get an external hard drive, activate Time Machine, and forget about it. You'd be glad you did.

[sparklepuff]

I keep a Time Machine backup that stays at home, a cloned portable drive that stays with me but separate from where my computer is in case it gets stolen or destroyed, and all of my current projects saved in Dropbox.

[re:dream]

Wow, you are almost as OCD as me

[tedlogan]

You have to backup your data man. I just save all my projects online, with Google Drive. My Live project folder is synced to GDrive, so anytime anything is saved, it immediately starts uploading. I've also synced this with my laptop, so my projects on the two computers I use are always exactly in sync/copies of each other.

I wish I used this system way earlier - I never have to think about backing up ever, nor copying stuff to and fro between two PCs.

[Samuel L. Jizzle]

All my work files are on Dropbox, but my music folder is too big, so I time machine everything AND do random manual backups about once every two months. This way I always have 2 backups of my music and 3 of my work.

Hasn't failed me so far....

[sparklepuff]

Wow, you are almost as OCD as me

If it's your livelihood it's not OCD, just smart. I also have a 2nd laptop running the same set at the same time in case laptop 1 shits the bed while I'm playing. So I suppose that counts as a 4th backup.

[Martin Gifford]

I don't backup as much as I should. And files are all over the place. I guess the reason is simplicity and reliability. If there's an extremely simple solution that works 100%, then I would do it.

• 1. Time Machine sounds good, but I'm on Windows.
  2. Net often requires that you are always connected. And I don't like using Google and cloud storage since the NSA stories. They give you privacy policies so you think they care about privacy but really it's just CYA for them.
  3. External hard drive is no good if you are robbed or your house is burnt down, but those are unlikely.

Dunno. Maybe get a USB stick with big capacity and keep it on your key chain?

[Broomptish]

You have to backup your data man. I just save all my projects online, with Google Drive. My Live project folder is synced to GDrive, so anytime anything is saved, it immediately starts uploading. I've also synced this with my laptop, so my projects on the two computers I use are always exactly in sync/copies of each other.

I wish I used this system way earlier - I never have to think about backing up ever, nor copying stuff to and fro between two PCs.

Yes this after the last back up your drive thread I seen someone mention this, now all my ableton projects are in my google drive so anytime you save its backed up to the google drive cloud, great idea and really gives me piece of mind. Another positive is the ableton projects are somewhere easily found on pc, not bloody app data which sometimes can be difficult to locate easily. Also cant really see the NSA being interested in bloody ableton projects lolool

[Martin Gifford]

Never know. I write some lyric ideas on my clips. NSA might think they are subversive. Actually, I wrote a tune that has the placeholder title: Sci-Fi Arabic Invasion. It fits the vibe, but NSA would freak out if they saw that.

Hello, NSA

[re:dream]

There are things I don't want to be cloud-snoopable (banking passwords being the most obvious) but seriously my tunes are not commercially hot enough property for me to be worried about privacy there...

Window has an automatic backup option too. Not as easy as Time Machine but it still works.

USB Sticks have been known to fail. And they get lost easily.