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Hey Folks!

I am considering different methods of music/data backup and wanted to get your opinions and experience.

I have checked out Mozy Pro, a storage service. Also, I am considering a large external drive.

Have any of you used a payable service to backup your tunes?

Thanks in advance!

Kyle

Hey Kyle,

I was just talking about this in another post.... I use Carbonite and it is great. I can see all my files backed up and only one time I had to actually go into the backup and get something, but it was there waiting for me like it was supposed to be!

Almost bought an external drive but the amount of space I needed made more sense to get the service. I still may one day get an external drive but the thing I like about the service is that is backs up all the time while you work so you never have to take time or remember to do your backup.

HTH

Mm2000

I use several Back Up drives,and once a month I take a drive with a system B/U and all my projects to a buddy's house in case of disaster. He is a composer and has a drive for me to hold as well, and it gives us an excuse to do lunch and catch up. Maybe not the absolute best way to do it, but it did save his butt once or twice.

Anyway, it gives me a chance to catch up with a good friend.

Both are good ideas.

I use Carbonite and it is great.

I'll check that out!

I like the buddy system idea too.

Thanks guys!

I too was checking on this last weekend. I was checking cloud servers and internetFTP servers. Too expensive. For the kind of money I would spend on that for one year I could get some custom RAID back up system(s).

I currently have an exact copy of every drive on external HD's. I have 8 hard drives with my entire studio protected by Tripplite (battery powered) back-up... which have served me well (especially with one of our recent lightning strikes!)

I'm using CrashPlan for online backup. It has some pretty cool features for backing up online, locally, or to a friend's computer. It gives you unlimited space for online backup, the ability to backup your external drives, and it's only $50 a year. You definitely want to have backups offsite in case of catastrophe or theft.

http://www.crashplan.com/

I've been looking into this as well, and I was checking out Carbonite, but I read that if you remove the file from your drive , they will remove it from their server after 30 days. That would be counter-productive for me as what I need is a place I can store my finished projects so that I don't hog up my system.

Right now I'm backing them up to an external drive as well as to DVD, but would like a 3rd option as well.

I think those online backups are cool but there are issues - they don't retain any info that you delete from your hard drive so they really seem to be good for instantaneous backup of the system drive for example, or maybe of a critical audio drive that has a collaborative project happening.

I agree with Andy K - RAID drives are probably the easiest for backing everything up. And you can have one enclosure that you keep in a bank safety deposit box or at a buddies place.

My preference is to backup my main audio drive to another internal drive in my mac pro using Carbon Copy Cloner on an hourly schedule. this handles anything that is in progress. I also have auto backups enabled on my DAW's when working so I am only losing a couple minutes of work in the worst case scenario.

Then I backup all the stuff on my main computer onto a big mirror RAID enclosure from OWC / Macsales.com. Including any audio projects that are "done" but I want to archive, freeing up lots of space on my main audio drive and backup and keeping them running fast.

This runs on a less frequent schedule. After I get a stable system drive configuration when installing new stuff, I then back it up. so if the system drive goes down I can restore it immediately. I also have installation .zips and .dmg from downloaded software so i can reinstall that stuff fast as well, if I don't want to revert to the backup/

I don't subscribe to backing up to just one hard drive - instead I use the mirror RAID scheme, cause I have had a backup drive go down before which was infuriating to no end. They are machines, they only last for a certain number of run cycles.

roberthamilton wrote:I'm using CrashPlan for online backup. It has some pretty cool features for backing up online, locally, or to a friend's computer. It gives you unlimited space for online backup, the ability to backup your external drives, and it's only $50 a year. You definitely want to have backups offsite in case of catastrophe or theft.

http://www.crashplan.com/

hey robert - Crashplan does look pretty interesting.

When they say backup your external drives - do they mean unlimited # of externals - and other internal drives as well? like if you have a PC or Mac Pro with multiple internal drives?

andygabrys wrote:hey robert - Crashplan does look pretty interesting.

When they say backup your external drives - do they mean unlimited # of externals - and other internal drives as well? like if you have a PC or Mac Pro with multiple internal drives?

Yup... you can backup as many internal or external drives as you want... and they don't delete files you remove from your system after 30 days... they remain on their servers... it's very cool.