Backing up Projects on multiple drives

[soundman1234]

Hi everyone,

I would like to hear some input on your backing up process.

I would like to implement an easy backup program at the Production company I work with. We are running 3 editing studios running all external hard drives. We would like to at the end of the day to connect all drives, run a comparison on all drives. Then whatever is added on each drive that day will be backed up on all drives overnight to have 3 mirrors. It would also be a bonus if a file is deleted on two hard drives it will then be moved to a folder on the computer to be reviewed after.

I have backed up using a program called free file sync before and it works great, but I would like to hear from other audio people on your process

thanks :)

[JFreak]

Google CCC


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Darryl Ramm]

These systems are well connected over local Ethernet and you can use that network for heavy data traffic? Do you have a NAS or SAN already? Why do we care they are "external drives"? (you are *not* going to want to physically move external drives). Are all these Windows systems?

If you want to coordinate things studio wide I would start with thinking about a NAS box. Also that may be the best place to spin up archives and off site backups from. Sessions get downloaded from the NAS to local storage, worked on and reuploaded back there. With a little scripting you can lock others out from downloading a session being worked elsewhere or however you want to handle stuff. Or with disk cache and a good NAS you can probably run off the NAS itself although I probably would not.

Trying to three way sync three different drives and get stuff "right" without a lot of manual attention/control may not go well. Corner cases if you try to automate this may cause problems.

I would not be relying only on three "backups" that are kept online on the different systems. It was not clear if you also had additional offline backup plans. The number one cause of data loss is human error and the best way to avoid that is having offline backups that can't get messed with. Even three separate systems can fail, loss of the building, theft of the external drives, all accidentally deleted if network shared etc. And having your backups on live production system, might mean they are accidentally opened/run and then which is the real "most recent copy" you want to copy to the others? You can try to prevent that but it's going to be a risk.

Or give up on syncing stuff at a studio level and just keep local backups of each system (you need multiple backups of each system and/or session to be safe). All depends on the detailed goals, how much sessions move between rooms/systems, how good a network you have, do you have staff who can manage a SAN etc. etc.

[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Google CCC

It's mac only.
I think OP is talking windows.

This had been unnecessary had he provided more details in the first place.

[soundman1234]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for your reply.

We are all running macs.

@ Darryl Ramm at the end of the day, we bring all hard drives to one studio to be backed up (Yes its an old way of doing things)

A Nas server is a great idea but the boss is not interested in a NAS right now we are not a big enough company to run a NAS right now... But might pitch it to him again.