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  #21  
Old 03-25-2013, 08:46 AM
Hugh-H Hugh-H is offline
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Default Re: Have a Backup Plan. Regardless of platform

Hello Southsidemusic,

I recognize your confusion at how far you should go to back things up. Some of these folks do a very good job at the old adage "if it's not in 3 places it's not really backed up".
Shipping our systems all over the place for high-profile television shows there is no such thing as downtime. We need two things - backups that allow instant recovery in the event of failure, and easy for the sometimes less-than-stellar operators we come across. Our strategy may work for you -

Two external drives that travel with the workstation, firewire or usb. One is the TimeMachine backup and one is the Carbon Copy Cloner Clone drive. They're both 2.5" drives in external enclosures so they don't take up much space.
If someone installs a plugin or something that causes issues, the TimeMachine backup can get them back. If there is a drive failure as we had a couple of weeks ago, boot from the Clone drive and continue on until the primary can be replaced.

This is a simple plan that gets you going on your backups. Plan the cloning for when the system is in a known good state that you can get back to if there's an issue. We also put images on the server for when the clone drive fails but you can do that later.

Hugh
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  #22  
Old 03-25-2013, 10:03 AM
sunburst79 sunburst79 is offline
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Default Re: Have a Backup Plan. Regardless of platform

From a safety adage a lot of folks use the 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies-in two different places. One copy off site.
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  #23  
Old 03-25-2013, 08:02 PM
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gtomassetti gtomassetti is offline
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Default Re: Have a Backup Plan. Regardless of platform

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Originally Posted by EGS View Post
Ha !!! I had the original Ensoniq Mirage 8-bit sampler !!! Then, I added a Mirage rack version, then an ASR-10. Got rid of all those, but I still have a TS-10 in my studio. And yes, and a big box of Mirage sample floppies in storage that the TS-10 can read. My oh my...
Ensoniq users of the world, unite!

I always used 2 floppies, saving away every few seconds. Unfortunately, because I didn't want to keep switching floppies while recording, I only backed everything up to the second floppy at the end of my working. It was a case of my fingers moving faster than my brain that day, for sure…

Back when I used to work for a small publishing company (on PCs), the graphic designer who did all of our book covers was a Photoshop black belt. But he rarely saved while working because his PC was so slow that it would literally take a half hour or more to render a photo. (This was in 1999–2001, and I should say that the network there was a very primitive, jerry-rigged thing, so there was no server, per se.) There were a few times that he lost a huge amount of work because of a crash. After one of those disasters, he went into the boss's office and basically had a meltdown, so they finally bought him a new Dell.

In my own work, hitting cmd-S literally every few seconds has become second nature. Whether in PT, or Finale, or InDesign, or Word, or whatever, I save incessantly, so at worst I might lose a few seconds of work, but not much else. Bear in mind that I'm not working in the same kind of situations or with the massive sessions that most of you probably do every day.
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  #24  
Old 03-25-2013, 08:15 PM
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gtomassetti gtomassetti is offline
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Default Re: Have a Backup Plan. Regardless of platform

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As I grab the drive to take a closer look one of the semiconductors bursts into flame while I had the drive in my hand. They have a fantastic 3D glow as they burn from the inside out. Needless to say I now have more backups.and spare drives. Kinda freaky to lose your drive and see it go up in your hand.
In the 80s, I was obsessed with Alesis MIDIVerb II. At one point, I had I think 6 of them, 4 in a big 18-space rack on wheels that was my keyboard module rig back when I was a rock/wedding band player. One day, I got yet another MIDIVerb, installed it in the rack, attached the wall wart, plugged it in, and the damned thing blew up on me. Flames were literally shooting out the back. Alesis sent me a new one (and a coffee mug, that I had for years).

When I moved to PT 9 a couple of years ago, I got a Metric Halo ULN-2. Because I was already using all the FW ports on the back of my Mac Pro, I bought a Sonnet PCIe card that had several FW ports on it. I installed the card, installed the MH MIO drivers, plugged the ULN-2 into a port on the Sonnet card, and heard a loud PING come from inside the computer.

I shut everything down, opened the case, and saw that a capacitor (or something) on the PCIe card had completely blown off. There was this smoky place on the card, and I had to disconnect everything from the computer and turn it over and shake it to fish out the capacitor (or whatever it was). Sonnet sent me a new card (but no coffee mug).

We should start an OT thread talking about gig or hardware disasters. I could tell the story about the drummer in my band who fell down a flight of stairs in the middle of a gig…
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  #25  
Old 03-25-2013, 09:52 PM
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Shan Shan is offline
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Default Re: Have a Backup Plan. Regardless of platform

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Originally Posted by gtomassetti View Post
In my own work, hitting cmd-S literally every few seconds has become second nature.
Ctrl+S is probably the first thing that becomes habitual as a computer user. It's my nervous tic which I think has now become a disorder.

Shane
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  #26  
Old 03-26-2013, 03:45 AM
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gtomassetti gtomassetti is offline
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Default Re: Have a Backup Plan. Regardless of platform

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It's my nervous tic which I think has now become a disorder.
Me, too. Can't tell you how many times I inadvertently sent an email from Outlook Express because of that tic!
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  #27  
Old 03-26-2013, 10:39 AM
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albee1952 albee1952 is online now
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Default Re: Have a Backup Plan. Regardless of platform

Auto-save cured me of that But Acronis gets a workout here Its good to see that there are some that are even WORSE than me when it comes to backups(now I don't feel so bad)
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  #28  
Old 03-26-2013, 08:34 PM
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gtomassetti gtomassetti is offline
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Default Re: Have a Backup Plan. Regardless of platform

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Originally Posted by albee1952 View Post
Auto-save cured me of that But Acronis gets a workout here Its good to see that there are some that are even WORSE than me when it comes to backups(now I don't feel so bad)
When you say "worse than you," do you mean more obsessive/compulsive?

I'm telling you, it's nothing to be ashamed of!

To take it a step further, here's some more backup mania:

My PT sessions are all done on the 2TB Hitachi in drive bay 2 (if I'm on my MBP, I record to an external Glyph, then transfer the session to the Mac Pro for editing). Then each session is backed up onto the 1TB Hitachis in bays 3 and 4.

BUT, it's in my Finale backups that I'm completely out of control: All Finale files are saved into a master folder called Mac Finale Music Files. That folder is on my PCIe SSD system drive. Then, there are backups on each of the 4 HDs in my Mac, THEN on an external FW drive, THEN onto two external USB drives, and FINALLY onto my MBP.

Overkill? Probably. For example, just tonight I had a rehearsal where I had done some charts for a cellist. We found 2 minor mistakes in one of them, so I noted them, and when I got home I made the corrections. It took me longer to copy the files to all the backup locations than it did to fix the mistakes and print out a fresh copy.

Yep, I have issues…

But all kidding aside, this kind of redundancy has saved my butt before. My day job is running a church office, and a few years ago, just days before Easter, the HP computer there had a complete system failure. But because of my redundant external backups, I lost no files at all. The only thing I needed to do was get a new HD installed and restore.
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  #29  
Old 03-27-2013, 07:41 AM
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Default Re: Have a Backup Plan. Regardless of platform

One thing is for sure, nobody ever said, "Thank God I never backed that up!"
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  #30  
Old 03-27-2013, 08:18 AM
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gtomassetti gtomassetti is offline
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Default Re: Have a Backup Plan. Regardless of platform

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Originally Posted by albee1952 View Post
One thing is for sure, nobody ever said, "Thank God I never backed that up!"
…unless it was something so profoundly bad that the only way to get it off of the planet was to completely trash it "by accident!"

(There are a few recordings I've heard where I wish that had happened!)
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