Backups

[midnightrambler]

Thanks for all the replies, most helpful!

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by dominicperry

I forgot to mention - SSD isn't a very reliable long-term storage medium, unless you plug the disk in and let it "refresh" every six months or so. The charge in the cells fades away and suddenly the data gets corrupted.

Nothing lasts forever, except slow spinners that you never power down. But good point, use it or lose it.

I once needed to move a +10yr old server from old server room to new, but I was wondering what happens to disks. So what did I do? I took aggregate next to the server, and brutally unplugged the server only to plug it in the aggregate fast as I could. Spinners slowed down from 15krpm to something like 10krpm, but sped up again after power was reconnected. Obviously OS crashed, but the server survived without dataa loss.

We do not have much experience on industrial scale SSD's yet, so it is hard to say really. But it is not so bad as they tried to tell us, that the storage needs to be replaced every so often because they break down. MTBF of 300 thousand hours of spinners is nothing compared to 1.5 million hours of SSD's. Also for a pretty normal 4TB SSD the number of terabytes written before failure is not bad, around 2400TBW. Sure it only means writing its capacity 600 times from empty to full, but if you write that 4TB every day it is still almost two years.

Good luck backing up. Plan ahead and you won't be sorry. One local (fast) copy and one remote (slow) copy should do it even in a case of fire.

[pavlor]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Nothing lasts forever, except slow spinners that you never power down. But good point, use it or lose it.

I once needed to move a +10yr old server from old server room to new, but I was wondering what happens to disks. So what did I do? I took aggregate next to the server, and brutally unplugged the server only to plug it in the aggregate fast as I could. Spinners slowed down from 15krpm to something like 10krpm, but sped up again after power was reconnected. Obviously OS crashed, but the server survived without dataa loss.

We do not have much experience on industrial scale SSD's yet, so it is hard to say really. But it is not so bad as they tried to tell us, that the storage needs to be replaced every so often because they break down. MTBF of 300 thousand hours of spinners is nothing compared to 1.5 million hours of SSD's. Also for a pretty normal 4TB SSD the number of terabytes written before failure is not bad, around 2400TBW. Sure it only means writing its capacity 600 times from empty to full, but if you write that 4TB every day it is still almost two years.

Good luck backing up. Plan ahead and you won't be sorry. One local (fast) copy and one remote (slow) copy should do it even in a case of fire. https://zaza-casino-en-ligne.com/

it was a daring experiment).

[michael c]

Since I moved up to Monterey, CCC doesn’t clone the drive as a bootable disk now, or do I have that wrong. What is the best way to have a cloned bootable drive in case of a disk failure? I’ve always heard Time Machine causes issues with PT, so I’ve never used that. I know that is just for backing up files. Is CCC still a better choice for daily back ups but what do you use for a cloned boot drive with Monterey and Ventura etc.

Thanks.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by michael c

Since I moved up to Monterey, CCC doesn’t clone the drive as a bootable disk now, or do I have that wrong. What is the best way to have a cloned bootable drive in case of a disk failure? I’ve always heard Time Machine causes issues with PT, so I’ve never used that. I know that is just for backing up files. Is CCC still a better choice for daily back ups but what do you use for a cloned boot drive with Monterey and Ventura etc.

Thanks.

No. You need to read the info on the CCC website (https://bombich.com). Mike Bombich has gone to great lengths to explain this situation.

CCC uses the underlying macOS provided mechanism to clone a bootable APFS image, what it cannot do is then later clone additional files to that volume like you could with CCC on older Mac systems.

You need to think though all this carefully for yourself, wether you want to go the the lengths needed to allow external boot off a clone with macOS on Apple Silicon. And you should play with doing this since lots of things have changed. Including total failure of the internal mac SSD on an Apple Silicon system will leave the computer completely unbootable, even if you have set it up to enable external boot. In which case fast recovery likely requires a second compatible system, or going and buying one.

What you use for things like daily work backups is up to you, but in general CCC users are likely to be using incremental clones of the boot drive less than with older systems (since they won't be bootable).

It's maybe healthier to think about recovery of the macOS image and boot drive and having separate rapidly updated copies of your working sessions (to removable storage, cloud, etc.). You can use Time Machine, as long as it's not trying to backup sessions while you are working on them, but it's often clunky and complex vs. just explicitly zipping up sessions and copying them to backup storage. Either manually or via shell scripts. That starts to get more painful as session content gets larger and Time Machine might become appealing (more technical users can script around some of the large session issues).

Whatever you do, you should to think though the recovery process for macOS, apps/plugins, and/or your sessions. And ideally test it.

[EmilILönneberga]

I use a separate Mac connected via 10GbE to my PT Mac as audio / session drive.
The separate 'server' Mac is equipped with fast PCIe SSDs as audio / session drives.
Time Machine is backing up internally the data from the SSDs to a RAID with spinning drives.
Since Time Machine is not running on the same system as Pro Tools, I don't have a problem with it at all.
It'll back up the SSDs every hour and keeps the older backups for a while, which is nice, because I can actually go back to look for an older version of a session or audio file.
I set up CCC to back up the HDD backup RAID via network to an old NAS every night.
On the PT Mac I set up Time Machine as well with 'Back Up Automatically' turned off. After every shift I'll just hit 'Back Up Now'.
Since the PT Mac doesn't contain any project data it doesn't take long.
I'll use it sometimes to go back a day or two if I installed software that didn't turn out to be working as advertised.
Time Machine is storing snapshots on the system drive which makes it super convenient and fast to go back.
This doesn't apply if you update or re-install your OS, then you'll have to go back to the actual backup which can take some time.

[audiolex1]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Nothing lasts forever, except slow spinners that you never power down. But good point, use it or lose it.

I once needed to move a +10yr old server from old server room to new, but I was wondering what happens to disks. So what did I do? I took aggregate next to the server, and brutally unplugged the server only to plug it in the aggregate fast as I could. Spinners slowed down from 15krpm to something like 10krpm, but sped up again after power was reconnected. Obviously OS crashed, but the server survived without dataa loss.

We do not have much experience on industrial scale SSD's yet, so it is hard to say really. But it is not so bad as they tried to tell us, that the storage needs to be replaced every so often because they break down. MTBF of 300 thousand hours of spinners is nothing compared to 1.5 million hours of SSD's. Also for a pretty normal 4TB SSD the number of terabytes written before failure is not bad, around 2400TBW. Sure it only means writing its capacity 600 times from empty to full, but if you write that 4TB every day it is still almost two years.

Good luck backing up. Plan ahead and you won't be sorry. One local (fast) copy and one remote (slow) copy should do it even in a case of fire.

I did find some old IDE drives and mounted them. Still worked. Though they were a little noisy and slow.
But I was able to transfer off what I wanted to to backup and did security erase and threw the drive out.

I've had 2 SSD drives throw errors fairly quickly. I took one out of use as I kept getting warnings from Drive Genius.
Of the 18 I have, SDD, that is it so far.

Definitely monitor their health. Plug ones that aren't used as often in at least every 3 months, but better just to do every month. Let them spin up, leave on for 5 minutes.

[Thenewexhibit]

This is a lot of great info! I admit, I do not know a lot about any of this.... Carbon Copy Cloner seems very popular!

I have a very noob question... If I have a drive with a bunch of sessions on it, and I copy the whole drive over to another external drive, what is the best way to back up a session after doing more work? Do you just click and drag the whole drive over to the backup drive and does it update only what has been changed, or do I just drag over the session I've worked on?
For example, say I have a drive with 10 bands on it divided into artist folders, and each band has 10 songs with each artist's folder respectively. I drag all of the band folders to a new external backup drive. Everything copies; great. Now, I work on one session from one of the bands and need to back it up. Would I then just drag all of that drive over again to the backup drive, or would I just drag over the song session folder of the band that I worked on to the external backup drive and drop it over the previous backup folder version? Does a mac know which files to copy over and see that things have changed and only update what's necessary, not touching any of the other song folders etc.?

Sorry if that was long winded and hard to understand, but I truly do not know much at all about backing anything up, which is in fact a little embarrassing and very foolish of me to just now be asking about it haha

[FunkzzaJ]

On windows here. Using Macrium Reflect. Back C: and D: to external HDD using Macrium Reflect.

Lots of good tips and info on my old thread: http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=407194

/T

[EGS]

Originally Posted by FunkzzaJ

On windows here. Using Macrium Reflect...

+1