How do you backup?

[the.engineer]

Hi Everyone,

How do you all backup your sessions and system drives? I've been meaning to get some sort of NAS storage drive for some time now but I'm flummoxed buy a) the options out there and b) the seemingly high cost.

I currently have a Raid 0 (stripe) 4 TB audio drive inside my Mac Pro 5,1 which backs up every half hour via Carbon Copy Cloner to an external Firewire 800 LaCie Drive. I also have another Firewire 800 LaCie drive that is a time machine drive that backs up my system drive every hour. Remarkably this doesn't interfere with my sessions whether I'm recording or playing back.

I definitely want to look at 'offsite' backup as all the hard drives are currently all in or by the computer and I'm on a big enough site with gigabit ethernet running everywhere that a NAS drive makes sense.

The DUC thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Cutlerbri]

Howdy James,

Consider getting at least one more 7200RPM HDD that is not connected to your system. It's rare, but cascading failures do happen and you don't want your backup drive eaten by the same thing that just had your system drive for lunch (belch!)

I have two spinners on the shelf. I get them down and back up my sessions via Carbon Copy Cloner after every important session or so.

I also have Barney. Barney is my close friend and client who brings his 7200RPM HDD over every few weeks. I copy to that one and he takes it home. This is my "God Forbid" drive that backs me up in case of disaster (fire, flood, theft, zombie apocalypse).

[albee1952]

I also keep a pair of big external USB3 drives and copy sessions to them weekly. The ideal system is to do this and then take 1 of the external drives and store in another building, but at least at the other end of the house if you are doing a home studio. If it doesn't exist in at least 3 places, its not backed up

While on the subject, I need to relate a recent disaster that hit my(in hopes of saving someone else the same problem). Hard drives(internal or external and magnets DO NOT MIX!!! You might not think about it, but magnets exist in places you might not think about...like headphones....Yep, my partner was constantly setting headphones down on the desktop, inches away from a drive. Don't think for one minute that that would never cause an issue because it did Then there's my iPhone with the magnet on the back for a mount in the car. I set it down on my laptop to go get a drink. As I set it down, I thought, I probably should not put that there. In the time it took for me to think that and reach for the phone, the laptop went blank and would not reboot. Good thing I had a drive image to recover from

[TOM@METRO]

Originally Posted by albee1952

If it doesn't exist in at least 3 places, its not backed up

^^^ This ^^^

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by albee1952

I also keep a pair of big external USB3 drives and copy sessions to them weekly. The ideal system is to do this and then take 1 of the external drives and store in another building, but at least at the other end of the house if you are doing a home studio. If it doesn't exist in at least 3 places, its not backed up

While on the subject, I need to relate a recent disaster that hit my(in hopes of saving someone else the same problem). Hard drives(internal or external and magnets DO NOT MIX!!! You might not think about it, but magnets exist in places you might not think about...like headphones....Yep, my partner was constantly setting headphones down on the desktop, inches away from a drive. Don't think for one minute that that would never cause an issue because it did Then there's my iPhone with the magnet on the back for a mount in the car. I set it down on my laptop to go get a drink. As I set it down, I thought, I probably should not put that there. In the time it took for me to think that and reach for the phone, the laptop went blank and would not reboot. Good thing I had a drive image to recover from

Looks like you got bit by the 'make it cheaper' mantra where shielding is non-existent. In order to make things lighter and smaller manufacturers are dropping metal casing and going with plastic. Not that that can't be excellent shielding but you have to spend money to do that. EMI/RFI shielding? Fuhgeddaboutit.

To me one of the biggest mistakes I see people make is that their backup system has drives that are live all the time and they don't provide for a drive that gets disconnected and placed elsewheres. And don't think so-called fireproof safes are the bee's knees either. I've heard the horror stories coming out of California with the recent round of fires where people had valuables stored in those safes and the safes did NOT survive or if they did whatever was inside was done for.

[Eric Lambert]

In each of our studios we backup to HDDs via TimeMachine and we also use CarbonCopyCloner to backup to our Google Filestream. CCC runs each night. That gives us to original, the hard copy, and the version in the cloud. Once set up it requires zero additional effort.

[zion]

Originally Posted by the.engineer

Hi Everyone,

How do you all backup your sessions and system drives? I've been meaning to get some sort of NAS storage drive for some time now but I'm flummoxed buy a) the options out there and b) the seemingly high cost.

I currently have a Raid 0 (stripe) 4 TB audio drive inside my Mac Pro 5,1 which backs up every half hour via Carbon Copy Cloner to an external Firewire 800 LaCie Drive. I also have another Firewire 800 LaCie drive that is a time machine drive that backs up my system drive every hour. Remarkably this doesn't interfere with my sessions whether I'm recording or playing back.

I definitely want to look at 'offsite' backup as all the hard drives are currently all in or by the computer and I'm on a big enough site with gigabit ethernet running everywhere that a NAS drive makes sense.

The DUC thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.

Just as others have said I also use CarbonCopyCloner to backup on three different hard drives and I backup everything.

[weezul]

I once had a session at a studio that I work for, where the only data drive (a 7200rpm hdd) decided to die and start clicking.

The drummer had come all the way from spain for a week of drum tracking. Of course it was the last day, and the data hadn't been copied over.

The studio owner came in and said 'empty the trash'. Lol.
I told him the best chance of recovery is to open the drive and move the stuck needle (which I've done more than once with 100% recovery rate of needed data).

Instead, we emptied the trash and watched the bar stick, then the computer froze and drive wouldn't spin up again.

They spent £700 on data recovery, still couldn't get the data.

It was that evening, I upped my own game. I have a program called Arq backup automatically back up my session drive every hour to the cloud.

I have a 4 bay RAID5 NAS in another room and CCC mirrors my session drive over to it once a day. My most current work stays on my SSD, and I can just delete older sessions, knowing they are in the cloud and on my NAS server.

Never looked back, never felt safer. It's all automated and totally worth doing. Another good thing about the Arq system is it keeps snapshots of data. If I were to accidentally overwrite a WAV file, I can go back on the Arq system and recover an older version. Corrupted or overwritten WAV files will propagate through the system otherwise. This is why I moved away from the RAID1 system I had before all this. The drives mirrored each other which was good for read speed, but for writing it's essentially useless. Any data writing problems are mirrored as well. I did have two drives die though in that time, and I didn't lose anything.

I'm dealing with other people's creations. Can't be ****ing around really. I've saved more than one person's data solely through my own backup system, including the same studio coming back to me years later. And don't expect clients to ever keep anything. I've had loads of them come back 6 months later 'oh can you send me our files again'...

[ProtoolsLover]

I am a freak about backups. I have 4 levels of backup. 2 internal drive bays and 1 external FW800 drive always connected and lastly a removable hard drive enclosure where I backup that drive once a week and keep the physical drive in a fireproof safe.

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by ProtoolsLover

I am a freak about backups. I have 4 levels of backup. 2 internal drive bays and 1 external FW800 drive always connected and lastly a removable hard drive enclosure where I backup that drive once a week and keep the physical drive in a fireproof safe.

That's still leaving yourself open to the loss of up to a week's worth of data if there were a fire. How about a cloud backup?