What method do you use for your sessions hard drive backup?

[awritersparadise]

I'm on PC. What hard drive back up method do you find most reliable?
I don't need anything slowing me down while I work.. so a nightly scheduled back up of only the changed files would be cool... or do you guys use another method you think is best when it comes to Pro Tools Sessions? Open to ideas.

[Darryl Ramm]

Slightly wrong question.... You should be asking "What *several* different methods do you use?"

You need stuff backed up multiple times and ideally in multiple different physical locations/offsite etc. and using different techniques (some are more idea for archiving. some for systems recovery etc.).

I expect any scheme today should include session backup to a cloud storage provider. Larger environments I like to see sessions backed up to secure NAS storage as well as image backups of systems.

Start by thinking though what you are really trying to protect against. Your finger problems, malicious or confused employees or customers, disk failure, computer failure, building failure, computer theft, misplacement/loss of an external drive. Think about how far back in time you might want to recover to, having ten copies of yesterdays session does not help if three days ago you gooched it. And think though how you would want to recover from those situations, how easy/fast etc. And *carefully* practice doing some of those recoveries and check that they work. I've seen major business system fail that test...

[EGS]

I manually copy to another drive, and then manually check properties on the source vs the copy ... so that I can sleep at night ... For me, the session is not over until I do this copy. I typically keep several copies as the project sessions continue, and I label them ProjectNameOLD01, ProjectNameOLD02, etc. When the project is completely finished, I copy to 2 externals, one stored off-site. If you are not 100% clear on Pro-Tools disk allocation, then you should do a save-session-copy to make sure you get everything. My 2 cents.

[IrelandM]

Originally Posted by awritersparadise

I'm on PC. What hard drive back up method do you find most reliable?
I don't need anything slowing me down while I work.. so a nightly scheduled back up of only the changed files would be cool... or do you guys use another method you think is best when it comes to Pro Tools Sessions? Open to ideas.

I'm on a Mac the hard drive back method I find most reliable would be to use single SSD drives and save versions of any session files to them subject to available space. I have used 7200rpm spinning disks more in the past for images and sound but would really like to see the cost of larger SSD's come down in price. I would like to access cloud storage but still like session data to be within my own control like locally so currently I use 250gb,500gb Samsung 860 SSd's for now.

I recorded on some gospel music last night via midi but found one ssd hard drive showed limited space available and these sessions where saved as multiple recordings into single sessions and renamed accordingly but if it was possible a way to update session data within protools then copy the session file data to and from a local master session into a temporary project storage space or a folder on my system then the Mac would be helpful if currently available.

Having used Raid drives I think ssd's are the way forward due to less cables, power required and weight also space and speed of Ssd's are faster for read and write factors than most spinning disks this storage is more cost effective and larger in capacity size. I would agree EGS with your method as its similar to my own but would be open to further thoughts from other PT/HD users.

Regards