Ableton Forum

Please tell us in detail the equipment you use, and your routine

SubFunk wrote:

hambone1 wrote:This is Kevin.

After losing a ton of work years ago without a backup, he continually backs up all work, both on- and off-site.

It's basic common sense (especially if you rely on your data professionally), it's easy, and hard drives are dirt-cheap nowadays.

+1

a drive no matter what can die at any point of time, i had once luck with a 30gb maxtor being under extremely hard use for over 8 years!! without a hitch, a friend of mine recently got a brand new HP lappy for work and his drive died after not even 2 month of lite use... you never know with HDs.

backup, backup, backup, external HD space is dirt CHEAP.
[i even double save every now and then really, really important things onto dvds]

Two FW800 drives set as a mirrored RAID array in OSX.

Everything is written to both drives, so no need for separate backups, apart from copying the data onto a third drive once a week and keeping it off-site.

i have one 270gb that sits in a drawer but its firewired for doing an entire system backup about once a month.

it's simple,

i use a G5 in the studio with two drives [250gb] one audio recording and one for the system. and a MBP, for the MBP i use for audio a 250gb drive in a firewire icy box. [performs perfectly]

and then i have right now 3 usb 2.0 icy boxes with also 250gb drives [got em' dirt cheap in a sales offer]

i use for MANUAL backup, i just put there from whatever system i use, the stuff i need to secure. and then i stick 'ultra' important stuff every now and then extra onto dvds.

also i keep only current projects on my MBP hd, i don't like to take my ext firewire audio HD everywhere [if not absolut necessary], once i don't need it to be 'mobile' anymore it goes onto the backup. [obviously i have it always on my firewire audio drive as well, so basically that is where it goes... first, if i go onto the road or a gig i stick it for a periodic use onto the MBP drive. done.]

might sound confusing / time intense, but it's dead easy and quick, that way i also have an easy time doing 'housekeeping' always right away and getting rid of 'overweight' cause i do all the copying manually... so i don't accumulate shit i don't need and that eats up space for nothing. the crap is then deleted right away.

i keep my backup drive seperate, and repace it once a month.. i only turn it on to back up my system drives

ut oh.. thanks for reminding me that sucker is full

mike holiday wrote:i keep my backup drive seperate, and repace it once a month.. i only turn it on to back up my system drives

ut oh.. thanks for reminding me that sucker is full

and of course always keeping a bare minimum of 10-15% [usually a bit more] free on the crucial 'audio work drives' for hussle free performance.
cause otherwise drives are more likely to choke, and start to make trouble / crash.

I use winrar command line tools to build and keep my backup up to date.

Winrar update my archive when my station is idle on my both backup drives ( one local, one in a network location in town) That way i'm not forgetting to do it anymore


cost nothing ( except for the storage) adaptable for all platform.

in this article you will find a basic winrar script to backup, just don't forget to put the switch on for no audio compression.

http://www.chrisevans3d.com/tutorials/backup.htm

I have a firewire400 RAID array with 2x80Gb drives... may not seem like much, but it's all the space that I need. I have various directories of things that need to be backed up... like my iPod, my iPhoto folder, music folder, etc.

My particular methodology is also not for the faint of heart, but it's the way I've been doing it for years, so I've come to trust it. My actual backup procedure is rather unix-centric, but hey, that's what I got. For each folders that needs to be backed up, I make the a script named "_Backup.command" (the underscore just so it appears above all the files). The contents of this file are:
Where "whatever" is the full system path to the folder that needs to get backed up (ex: $HOME/Music), and "drivename" is whatever you call the drive. Then, all you do is plug the drive in, double click on the script (need to set execute permissions on it first, though), and let 'er rip!

This solution may seem rather arcane, but it's much faster than drag-and-drop since it's an incremental backup, it copies hidden files and resource forks, and maintains a perfect copy on the backup device. The script can also be modified with minimal effort to do a remote backup to an offsite server, though at the moment I don't bother with that.

If you have the lines for it I would recommend http://www.mozy.com

Pay, install, configure and forget. Most likely the only
kind of backup that would work for me !

5$ a month for unlimited space. That wont get you
far in drives and dvd's - which also doesnt have
the advantages of offsite backup.

Happy user for more than a year now.

I use a couple thousand of these when I make a new track I want to save.

And some hard drives. 2 FW800 drives that I copy everything over to each week, I keep one in my office and one at home.

*taps forehead with index finger* It's all up here, baby...all up here!

i'm using subversion

it's a tool available for all os' - for free
i have everything into these 'repositories' that are like archives, that never forget anything you put in (commit)

you save a lot of space (compresses nearly 50% of audio data) with that tool... and you are forced to get managed

I have these repositories replicated onto 5 different external fw drives, using rsync...

yes, it's crazy, but someone broke into my house, and i once lost a notebook harddrive 'cause it crashed...

and it's really a rock solid thing, once you have set it up!

sarrass wrote:i'm using subversion
it's a tool available for all os' - for free
I have these repositories replicated onto 5
different external fw drives, using rsync...

Free as in you get 5 FW drives at you preffered size
in the mail when you download the software

sarrass wrote:i'm using subversion

it's a tool available for all os' - for free
i have everything into these 'repositories' that are like archives, that never forget anything you put in (commit)

I'm a big SVN fan... I use it a lot for my personal code/text files, as well as converting my workplace to use it, too. However, for audio data, I would definitely prefer rsync to svn... the fact that you can't permanently remove data from a repository is ideal for a corporate setting, but for users that work with audio/video data, the storage space required for the svn repo would be quite difficult to maintain..

I guess that does depend on how heavily people want to keep their data around, though. In a DJ set, for instance, I personally don't have much attachment to my tracks... play them 'till they're played out, and then move on to new stuff. SVN isn't designed to work quite that way.

to be clearer, I sync the svn repositories to the external drives (with rsync) that way the backup goes really quick (only new revisions must be transferred

I don't understand the point you made concerning the audio data???

and yes, I wouldn't back up a dj set... I'm talking about my own stuff here...

Jan, the repositories get synced multiple times (on several harddisks), for the rare occasion one gets burned or corrupted... you can have everything on one single disk if you like. And hey, how much is a 250GB harddisk nowadays? with case?

sqook wrote:

sarrass wrote:i'm using subversion

it's a tool available for all os' - for free
i have everything into these 'repositories' that are like archives, that never forget anything you put in (commit)

I'm a big SVN fan... I use it a lot for my personal code/text files, as well as converting my workplace to use it, too. However, for audio data, I would definitely prefer rsync to svn... the fact that you can't permanently remove data from a repository is ideal for a corporate setting, but for users that work with audio/video data, the storage space required for the svn repo would be quite difficult to maintain..

I guess that does depend on how heavily people want to keep their data around, though. In a DJ set, for instance, I personally don't have much attachment to my tracks... play them 'till they're played out, and then move on to new stuff. SVN isn't designed to work quite that way.