Have a Backup Plan. Regardless of platform

[sunburst79]

Your only as good as your last backup. Whats your disaster plan. Have you tested it. Do you have multiple copies in multiple places? Can you answer these questions?

One of the most importent things you will do is save your work and prepare for the bumps on the road ahead. How you go about it depends on your needs and budget. Windows Backup Image for newer Windows systems, Acronis, Apples Excellent Time Machine, A old copy of Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper. A free copy of Seagates Disk Wizard (a feature limited version of Acronis that only supports cloning) There are plenty of free methods out there and all you need are a spare drive, a network share or even a big pile of optical disks. Your plan can be as simple as a cloned system drive or a external drive with drive images saved to it. It could be as complicated as multiple machines automaticaly backing themselves up to a network server or share.

Your needs and the amount of downtime and data you can afford to lose will determine your plan. Setting some goals and creating and testing a plan is time well spent. How you implement it is up to you. However a the spending a little time up front may prove to be invaluable.

In a ideal situation you would be back up and running in minutes with little or no data loss. In a worse case scenario what would you do if you arrived at your studio to find the fireman packing up their gear?

In the spirit of the revamped forums I'd like to jumpstart the subject for any newcomers.

So whats Your plan.

[sunburst79]

My plan.

Regular Acronis backup of my DAW. All of the drives are hot swap. I have copies of the system drive, the audio drive and the sample drive along with the backup image drive. The forth slot in the drive bay allows me to hotswap drives in for cloning and copying. This machine its its entirity is backed up to a WHS that is the backbone of the PC side of things. WHS provides file and folder duplication and can tolerate HDD failures without losing data. Plus it handles backups for all the other PCs and serves as network storage and media server. My actual session files and audio are backed up to Gobbler. Worse case scenario of total devastation the sessions are intact.

My remaining Mac is backed up to a network share using Time Machine and a 3TB Seagate GoFlex Home. I also have Mac drive images on spare drives. Any sessions there synced to Gobbler. Future plans are to figure out a way to sync the Time Machine backup drive to the WHS box and to back the whole WHS box up to a different location. Theres some hurdles to overcome there.

I have a drive of disk images off site. I have a fairly foolproof system that requires minimal interaction. The cost to impliment was relatively minimal.

So whats your backup solution?

[Benoni]

Originally Posted by sunburst79

So whats Your plan.

I use Acronis to back up and make a complete working image on another HDD. So if something goes wrong I can Restore the backup, or pop in another hard drive with the image on it. It's always good to have a backup ready to go.

[albee1952]

+1 for Acronis(for Windows users). Not only do I have system drive images for 8LE, 9, 9.0.3, 10, 10.2, 10.3 (and 10.3.4 on my working system drive), I also have cloned/spare drives with 9, 10.2 and 10.3. Recovery is painless and takes 3 seconds longer than a shut down and reboot(thanks to no-caddy drive cages). Watch for sales on hard drives

I also highly recommend a battery backup UPS. Best Buy carries a pair of APC models($169 and $199) that can save your biscuits Leave your speakers off that as you don't need to hear if the power fails, you just need to not lose data.

[guitardom]

Removable drive bay system with at least 2 OS drives and 4 partitions on each.
1.Basic windows install
2.Tweaked and basic programs and plugs installed (NO PT)
3.partition for testing and experimenting w new plugs and PT builds, will do work on it as well.
4.Tested Working partition

Use Casper to clone the drives to eachother and use Casper to restore these partitions. First 2 partitions don't change for the most part and clone typically the tweaked partition to one of the last 2 testing and working partitions and install PT fresh.
Has been a fool proof setup!

[Southsidemusic]

Hey Friends

Holy crap! You really have serious backup gears but my question here is:

If you have a production studio and need to have atleast 1 backup so we can revert to a working Pro Tools if the crash of the century would happen, what should we get? Note that we do NOT record any vocals or instruments here and rent a real recording studio here when we need to do that and so we need a small backup system and a drive that can save to at the same as the normal drive we record to so what should we do here? We only need the PT backed up as it is nothing else on these macs.

Best
Chris

Thanks guys

[guitardom]

Originally Posted by Southsidemusic

Hey Friends

Holy crap! You really have serious backup gears but my question here is:

If you have a production studio and need to have atleast 1 backup so we can revert to a working Pro Tools if the crash of the century would happen, what should we get? Note that we do NOT record any vocals or instruments here and rent a real recording studio here when we need to do that and so we need a small backup system and a drive that can save to at the same as the normal drive we record to so what should we do here? We only need the PT backed up as it is nothing else on these macs.

Best
Chris

Thanks guys

At bare minimum have your c drive cloned to another drive. Mount it in your case and if a problem arrives with that drive, unplug the sata and power and move it to the cloned drive.

[Shan]

On this topic I use multi partitions myself, but more importantly I have fixed sequential disk images created in all various states:

• W8 64 Basic: This is a fresh install of the OS and nothing more. No drivers, updates or anything.
• W8 64 Updates: All OS updates from MS. OS auto update is disabled at this point.
• W8 64 Drivers: All needed hardware drivers installed.
• W8 64 Optimizations: All Avid recommended optimizations.
• W8 64 Optimizations Advanced: Advanced optimizations of my own added.
• W8 64 Programs: Programs PT needs to function such as QuickTime, iLok drivers and some very minimal stuff such as 7zip etc. This is my default image that I restore with every new release of PT. I always do a fresh install of PT and never update whenever possible. This specific image has saved me hours of down time and gets used the most.
• W8 64 PT 10.3.4: PT installed with included plug-ins. PT Options, Playback Engine, Hardware and Preferences are setup. Auto update in PT is disabled.
• W8 64 PT & plug-ins: 3rd party plug-ins added.

It might seem overkill, but I never have long winded down time and you only have to image once. I do the same with my OSX partitions. I also never update the OS and disable auto updates in an earlier image. When it's solid and working, I lock it off. The end result is a rock solid system that is 100% stable and never crashes.

Shane

[sunburst79]

Originally Posted by Shan

On this topic I use multi partitions myself, but more importantly I have fixed sequential disk images created in all various states:

• W8 64 Basic: This is a fresh install of the OS and nothing more. No drivers, updates or anything.
• W8 64 Updates: All OS updates from MS. OS auto update is disabled at this point.
• W8 64 Drivers: All needed hardware drivers installed.
• W8 64 Optimizations: All Avid recommended optimizations.
• W8 64 Optimizations Advanced: Advanced optimizations of my own added.
• W8 64 Programs: Programs PT needs to function such as QuickTime, iLok drivers and some very minimal stuff such as 7zip etc. This is my default image that I restore with every new release of PT. I always do a fresh install of PT and never update whenever possible. This specific image has saved me hours of down time and gets used the most.
• W8 64 PT 10.3.4: PT installed with included plug-ins. PT Options, Playback Engine, Hardware and Preferences are setup. Auto update in PT is disabled.
• W8 64 PT & plug-ins: 3rd party plug-ins added.

It might seem overkill, but I never have long winded down time and you only have to image once. I do the same with my OSX partitions. I also never update the OS and disable auto updates in an earlier image. When it's solid and working, I lock it off. The end result is a rock solid system that is 100% stable and never crashes.

Shane

I do the same thing as far as building the images goes. I usually have spare system that I keep updated just to see what effect the Windows Updates may have.

[gtomassetti]

Originally Posted by Shan

On this topic I use multi partitions myself, but more importantly I have fixed sequential disk images created in all various states:

• W8 64 Basic: This is a fresh install of the OS and nothing more. No drivers, updates or anything.
• W8 64 Updates: All OS updates from MS. OS auto update is disabled at this point.
• W8 64 Drivers: All needed hardware drivers installed.
• W8 64 Optimizations: All Avid recommended optimizations.
• W8 64 Optimizations Advanced: Advanced optimizations of my own added.
• W8 64 Programs: Programs PT needs to function such as QuickTime, iLok drivers and some very minimal stuff such as 7zip etc. This is my default image that I restore with every new release of PT. I always do a fresh install of PT and never update whenever possible. This specific image has saved me hours of down time and gets used the most.
• W8 64 PT 10.3.4: PT installed with included plug-ins. PT Options, Playback Engine, Hardware and Preferences are setup. Auto update in PT is disabled.
• W8 64 PT & plug-ins: 3rd party plug-ins added.

I'm not a pro like you guys, but I firmly believe in having lots of viable backups. My Mac Pro has a Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD as the startup disk, and the original system HD (1TB Hitachi) is now the destination drive for CCC, which runs regularly.

I replaced the original HD on my MPB with a Mercury hybrid drive, and then that one with a Mercury Extreme SSD. Both of the previous HDs now live in USB enclosures from OWC, and I run CCC to them on a daily basis.

Of course, Time Machine runs regularly on both computers as well.

My documents are backed up on multiple drives in multiple locations, internal and external.

But I have a question for Shan: Can you explain the thinking behind your sequential W8 partition scheme?

Thanks,

Gary