[James Drake]

I use carbon copy cloner and disk utility.

For system drives i use disk utility to make disk images at incremental stages of the install (fresh snow leopard, tweak snow leopard, fresh PT, PT and plugs). A floating drive is used to store these disk images. At any point i can restore the pro tools rig to any of my chosen clean install states in about 15 mins.

Additionally, each system drive has a backup. This can run carbon copy incremental backups, every night for example.

Then at any point if there is a physical problem with the drive, or if someone does something to screw up the OS with a demo plugin or something, you can restore to the exact state it was yesterday immediately, or a clean install state in about 15 mins.

There should be no audio or other critical data on the system drives. Everything should be on dedicated external drives for a session or a client. Every evening, or even a lunchtime as well, this should be cloned to a backup drive using carbon copy cloner incremental backup.

Additionally the floating drive containing system images, and the backup session drive, should be cloned again and kept off site. But i have never been able to do this due to lack of resources.



When you do an incremental backup with carbon copy cloner, you have the option of deleting or archiving files on the DESTINATION drive. If you do some work, then run a backup, then delete a file, then run incremental backup, you can choose to delete this file on the backup drive (so the two drives match) or you can choose to archive this file on the backup drive. Carbon copy cloner makes folders at the root of the drive with time and date info and puts deleted files there. So as long as you have drive space you can get back a file you deleted last week.

I use the archive option for session drives, and not for system drives. I want the system drive backup to be a clone. If someone puts a file on the desktop, then deletes it, then wants it back, it's their fault for not putting on the session drive.