Best way to back up a hard drive

[Glenn75]

What is the best way to back up my external audio 120 gb hard drive? Do I burn all data to dvds? Back it up to a much larger drive like a 500gb, then clean off the existing drive? Retire the old drive and buy a new one?

[David Schober]

DVDs are the best long term solution as all hard drives over time will lose their ability to spin if you don't run them 3 or 4 times a year. DVDs are a pain as they hold such little info. It really depends on what your needs are. AIT tapes with Mezzo or Retrospect backup software are the industry standard for commercial delivery requirements. While an AIT drive can cost $500-1000 and are thus expensive, the tapes themselves are cheaper than drives.

If your songs are fairly small and will fit on one DVD I'd go that way and have a DVD per tune. Once you're done with a song it won't take that much time to back it up. But my sessions are usually too large to go that way so I go with AIT.

Many people do use Firewire drives as they aren't too expensive and hold a good amount of data. But as I said, you just gotta take them out and run them from time to time.

[Howardk]

I am not a fan of DVDs. . . they are too small and need to be supervised because most projects are bigger. I use AIT right now, but I have to boot OS9 Retrospec from OSX. I am thinking backing up my ProTools Mac projects via the LAN to a Windows 2000 server. . . and then that server will be backed up to tape. This way I can do a daily late night business data backup to one set of tapes and studio projects to specific project tapes all with one tape drive. Also it would mean redundacy between the Mac FW drives and the W2K Server's drives. The script could be run at breaks to make a quick update of the server etc. . . Anyone see a downside?

Anyone know of a way to write a script for a Mac that will compare files between a source and destination, and only copy over folders/files that are either not at the destination or newer than the the destination drive? Easy to do with a chckdsk and a CMD/batch file in Windows. . . but my ProTools system is an OSX Mac and I am not aware of how to do this in that world. Ideas?

Thanks!

[studiojimi]

i use DVDs and am happy with those

and CDRs with supplemental updates.

only suggestion is to BE CREATION DATE AWARE...especially of duplicate file names you encouter...there is software that will do this for you

sometimes files get modified and when that will bite you is later a year from now when you load in or replace neededs files with files of earlier creation dates.

be organized....make a rational plan and stick to it to reduce confusion and maintina your style of backup with consistancy. a thousand songs from now you will be glad you did

i believe in this
even my midi files from as far back 1986 are still easy to figure out because i made commitments for certain keyboards to channels and kept notes

good info on booting up those idle drives on a regular basis..thanks for that reminder.

[Ken P]

I keep a running firewire drive connected that i backup to as i work, but as far as archiving, i use DVD's. like others have mentioned, this can be a pain with large sessions. i have a rather drab way of filing, but it works really well...

i create a DVD ARCHIVES folder, and inside that folder i create a new folder titled DVD0001. i write this number on the DVD. i create aliases (or shortcuts in pc land) to the files on the DVD inside the folder DVD0001. i repeat this in number increments and when i need to search out a session, i hit apple-F and seek it out. comes back an tells me the session i am looking for is on "DVD0146", for example.

i know it is really a stone-aged way, but it works for me. i myself am paranoid about proprietary BU/Archive software. for years we were using Mezzo on OS8.6-OS9. recently i was forced to switch to PC with a 2nd room added and all of those sessions are now unaccessible unless i restore them to the Mac first and convert them over (haven't got the PC version of Mezzo yet, but that is for another forum...). at least with my 2 systems now, a session is a session no matter what computer i drop the disc in, rather than a giant file with a catalog file that needs software to extract the session data.

[Mark Wheaton]

retrospect does incrementals

[Spiritwalkerpro]

I'd be careful with DVD's. As with CDR's your data integrity is dependant on the burner/media relationship. As well, in the archiving business we always backup to two different types of media so that if one type of DVD or CDR batch is bad we have the other copy. I do have to say that here at our archive we are getting a little concerned with the quality of CDR's and in particular the availability of gold dye CDR's. With that in mind we are seriously looking at a server/raid setup with a backup on the main government system. It's funny how we were nudged into digital because of lower costs than analog tape, and now the lower cost digital solutions are disappearing or becoming unreliable. Crazy times for us in the archiving business.

[steins]

FWIW,

I make a backup of the whole project to FW HD. When the HD is full, it's placed on the shelf and replaced with a new. In addition, I burn a DVD of the project file and consolidatet media. I would not trust just one backup-format. I'd also make a third DVD backup for storing outside the studio. I've not done this myself (yet) but it makes great sense.

For day-to-day backup, I've gone from using DLT tape and Retrospect to just dragging the project folder to a dedicated backup drive.

For full drive backup of the system volume (before updates, new installs etc.), I use a great little app called Carbon Copy Cloner. It makes a mirror copy of the source disk, bootable and everything, to a new disk. I find it too slow for day-to-day backups.

Works for me.

Stein Tore

[Tweakhead]

retrospect does incrementals

As opposed to Mezzo, which does excrementals.

[Farmer Dave]

all hard drives over time will lose their ability to spin if you don't run them 3 or 4 times a year.

What is it that makes them stop spinning from un-use? This year I stopped writing DVD's & CD's because it's too time consuming, both for writing & retrieving. I've been treatings several offline ATA drives as removable media via a Wiebetech Combodock, which has been great. This is a bit alarming though, that the drives might not spin next time I got to mount them. I thought the shelf life would be longer than DVD's, expecially since they're sealed & not spinning.