Better saved than sorry

[nomiyah]

What are the best ways to save music files? I've been burning sessions on a CD and completed projects on an small external hard drive. What do you guys do? And, Matt, how do I get the autosave feature you mentioned in another thread?

[andreh]

Nomi-It sounds like you're mostly covered...but they say your data isn't backed up until you have it stored in 3 SEPARATE locations; like, 1 in the studio, 1 at your guitarist's house (that'll be the first one to get lost) and one at your parents'.You should always have at least one backup of each session on optical media (CD or DVD) since they have a much longer and more durable shelf life than hard drives. You can get several sessions on DVD, but if I can fit one per CD I usually do...then I can label that archive with more detail than if there were 5 or 6 sessions on the same disc.The autosave feature is available in most programs; in Pro Tools HD it's under Pro Tools [ver. #] ---> Preferences ---> Operation ---> Autosave.Even with auto save enabled, though, I'm in the constant habit of pressing apple-S after just about every edit...I'd rather replace my keyboard due to a bum "S" key (which has actually never happened) than lose that perfect take. HTH,Andre

[andreh]

Quote:Quote:...but they say your data isn't backed up until you have it stored in 3 SEPARATE locations; like, 1 in the studio, 1 at your guitarist's house (that'll be the first one to get lost) and one at your parents'.Hey Andre...May I ask you how this is meant? Quote:1 at your guitarist's house (that'll be the first one to get lost) GunterChairman of the guitarists union! I think you get my drift... I'm speaking from personal experience, since I can't seem to keep my guitar picks from disappearing...I mean hundreds of them over the years, just gone, without a trace...maybe those underpants gnomes from South Park have another passion? Andre

[Casey H]

I have been guilty of not always following my own advice, but here goes:External USB hard drives with tons of gigabytes (e.g. 80GB, 120GB, 160GB), are very inexpensive nowadays. I'll bet 80GBs are less than $100 (maybe even $80) now. Backing up music files is no different that backing up any important computer files. First, on your main computer, keep everything important under one root folder and a tree of subfolders... That makes dragging and dropping for backup easier. Every day you did work, back up that folder to an external hard drive with a simple drag and drop of (let's say) MyDocuments/NomiHits ... If you only changed one file or folder, obviously you only need to copy that one over. You could overwrite the prior backup or first rename the prior backup folder on the external drive to something like "NomiHits 10-02-06". Some like to rotate the last 5 or so backups, so they have a bit of history.For disaster protection against things like fire or flood, you could buy a 2nd external drive, do a backup less frequently to that, and keep it off-site. Many (me too!) have our backup drives sitting right next to our PC's. Many people and businesses have learned about that the hard way.And, as mentioned, there are web services that provide backup storage on their servers. Personally, I like my own external drives better, but that's a matter of choice.And for smaller files, there are also those little flash memory sticks. I don't consider them as reliable as hard drives, but for short term extra copies they are wonderful. As with hard drives, the storage per dollar goes up every day.Practice safe 'putering Casey

[nomiyah]

Like the smilies say... great answers from everyone. Reading I realized there are several issues.One is the constant saving during a session. I just discovered that ProTools has autosave on automatically, it'll save up to 50 takes. Plus my left hand is permanently in ctrl-s position!!!!Two is saving a session when you're done for the day. This is the area I need help on. I can burn it to a CD-Rewritable or DVD. Or use an external hard drive. I like the idea of storing online but not these giant audio files. Some people have a second computer dedicated to storing audio files. I googled the Terrabyte "thingy" http://www.nanoterabytes.com/store/inde ... ex&cPath=3 and this is a sample of what I found (first on the google list). Which one do you use, Teresa?Three is an off site CD or hard drive backed up less often.Four is permanent archiving of finished projects. I like portable external hard drives because you can take them places. Always have a back up copy off site.Thanks for all the other thoughts, more are welcome. Since each solution costs something, I like to research options.Nomi

[matto]

Quote: Two is saving a session when you're done for the day. This is the area I need help on. I can burn it to a CD-Rewritable or DVD. Or use an external hard drive. I like the idea of storing online but not these giant audio files.I recommend an external (USB or FW) harddrive for this. It's cost effective, even gigantic drives can be had for around $100 these days, and perhaps even more importantly backups are really fast and painless, which means you'll actually DO them every day . With CDRW's and DVD's, it's always a bit of a hassle and I found myself postponing back-ups because of that. CDR's/DVDR's are good for archiving of course once the song is done.

[roughly]

Nomi,Ya, I guess I should have included a link for the Terabyte "Thinger". We use the Buffalo Terastation Home Server. www.buffalotech.com. We started with a 1TB but then found a deal on 500G drives so swapped out the drives to make it a 2TB machine. That's the max of these at the moment. We got ours at Fry's, so if you have one around you it's definitely the best deal. There's also a company called Yellow Machine (the boxes are very cute and yellow). But it was more difficult to setup so I opted for the Buffalo when it went on sale. Let me know if you want more info on them. I could go on for days about these things but don't want to bore anyone It also seems that a lot of external drives and the Terastations come with backup software (or at least a demo of the software). You can set it to backup a specific folder every day at the same time. I think it will backup any new files so it's not just backing up the whole folder for hours. We've never tried any software, but it might be worth looking into.Theresa

[nomiyah]

Quote:Quote: Two is saving a session when you're done for the day. This is the area I need help on. I can burn it to a CD-Rewritable or DVD. Or use an external hard drive. I like the idea of storing online but not these giant audio files.I recommend an external (USB or FW) harddrive for this. It's cost effective, even gigantic drives can be had for around $100 these days, and perhaps even more importantly backups are really fast and painless, which means you'll actually DO them every day . With CDRW's and DVD's, it's always a bit of a hassle and I found myself postponing back-ups because of that. CDR's/DVDR's are good for archiving of course once the song is done.I agree and even though blank CDs are cheap in bulk, I don't like using them because it seems like a waste when you're saving something every day.

[nomiyah]

Quote:Nomi,Ya, I guess I should have included a link for the Terabyte "Thinger". We use the Buffalo Terastation Home Server. www.buffalotech.com. We started with a 1TB but then found a deal on 500G drives so swapped out the drives to make it a 2TB machine. That's the max of these at the moment. We got ours at Fry's, so if you have one around you it's definitely the best deal. There's also a company called Yellow Machine (the boxes are very cute and yellow). But it was more difficult to setup so I opted for the Buffalo when it went on sale. Let me know if you want more info on them. I could go on for days about these things but don't want to bore anyone It also seems that a lot of external drives and the Terastations come with backup software (or at least a demo of the software). You can set it to backup a specific folder every day at the same time. I think it will backup any new files so it's not just backing up the whole folder for hours. We've never tried any software, but it might be worth looking into.TheresaSure... go ahead and bore me, but make sure you dumb it down please since I'm not a techie. I don't understand how these thingy's differ from an external hard drive. I appreciate the comment about the equipment being cute, maybe it's a girl thing but so much equipment is downright ugly. Needless to say, not enough of a reason to get something.

[roughly]

Hi Nomi,Well, you asked for it, I'll do my best to not put you to sleep and keep out extreme techie jargon. Not that I'm that much of a computer person, but somehow I became the person to fix the 5 computers around here so I have a basic understanding at least.One of the biggest advantages to these boxes are that they can have a RAID between 4 drives. There are different types of raids, but in our case it is for making duplicates of the data. So if one of the 4 hard drives fails, the other three still have all of the data in tact. You simply replace the bad hard drive and you're safe again. If 2 hard drives go out, there's a good chance you're screwed, but it would be very rare for that to happen. Another advantage to these thingys are that you can link them to a UPS. So if your power goes out and your ups is working they will shut themselves off automatically to help protect your data. The last really big advantage is that they can hook up to your network without being linked to a computer directly. So you don't have to bog down any computer resources while backing up your data which can be nice if you have several computers on your network trying to access the backup location. If you only have one computer I guess it's not too big of a deal. Many of these thingys have a gigabit network too to help speed things up. (though the yellow machine did not have a gigabit network).Other features that you may or may not care about: Many of these have extra USB ports so if your computer is already full to the brim (like ours) not only are you not connecting another usb port to your computer, but you have more available to you. The Buffalo can be used as a printer server so you can plug your printer into it to help keep computer resources less bogged down (but I tried that recently with mixed results so opted to keep the printer on the computer, but maybe other people will know something I don't about that). Going back to the raid, you can set up the 4 drives in different configurations. The 3 main ones that you would use for this are (excuse the techie jargon here): JBOD: One enormous drive - so you could have a huge 2 terabyte drive to fill up.Raid 1: Data is striped exactly between the 2 drives. So you essentially cut the amount of space available to use in half because what writes to one drive, it also writes to a different drive. This is the most fail safe method.Raid 5: It somehow stripes between the 4 drives in a matter that makes the most efficient use of space but keeps all the data redundant so if one drive fails your still good.We use raid 5 and get 1.36 TB of usable space (after the reduncancy and file allocation stuff). For most people that is probably a lot of space, we tend to save a lot of different versions and have many tracks so our files get pretty big. So you would probably get by with a much smaller one. The downside of these are that they do take up more space than a single external drive. They also are mini computers themselves so they have a noisy fan and produce heat. And they are not very portable (compared to an external hard drive). I'm all for the good looking computer gear too It's starting to get better finally and there are some pretty kickin cases out there, but so much of it is still so boring. I have to admit that looks are a deciding factor in some computer gear for us (even my husband hates the beige computer look). It's something we have to see everyday for usually 12+ hours, so it may as well be pleasing and inspire creativity. Beige, silver and black seem to shout mediocrity, "Hey I want to fit in with everyone else" But maybe that's just me Okay, I'm sure you are probably asleep by now...I really did go on for a long time. Hopefully what I said made sense too and helps you in your decision. Theresa