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Well, if you have read about my PT8/disk drive problems, you probably are not surprised that I've gotten religion on back up issues. I thought I was doing pretty well, making a monthly snapshot of the main disk and backing up sessions on a sporadic basis in between. But, I've found out just how long a month is and how scattered and disorganized my sporadic backups were. I've missed a few sessions that should have been (but were not) backed up, so I'm hoping to recover my data.

So to the future - What are your backup procedures? Do you use backup software? If so, what? How do you have it configured? I'm interested in both PC and Mac.

Comments

Codemonkey Tue, 08/25/2009 - 01:06

You may like Allway Sync, automatically (or manually) copies files from location X to location Y and back.
Good for travelling work where you have a flash drive and you want stuff sync'd between them.
But equally good for just copying files from a folder to a second.
[[url=http://[/URL]="http://allwaysync.c…"]Feature list[/]="http://allwaysync.c…"]Feature list[/]
There's a free and business version, the free version yells at you if you copy a lot of data but doesn't lock up. Which is good because I think it's in error; I'm well under their "usage limits".

TheJackAttack Tue, 08/25/2009 - 06:42

Most of the large 3.5" retail drives from Seagate and the like also come with back up software. Win Vista as well as Win7 have built in utilities for this. The "safest" way is probably a Raid array. Then you have identical data on multiple drives. If one fails you still have all data available. I just wouldn't use a raid array as an audio destination folder.

song4gabriel Tue, 08/25/2009 - 12:52

after losing 6 months worth of recording on a system crash ( i eventually recorved it but it took me 3 weeks to do so) i back up my stuff after every single meaningful session

my external drive came with the software and it has the "turn off computer when done" thingy so i initialize a back up and then go to bed

sq

MadMax Wed, 08/26/2009 - 04:47

I take a hybrid approach...

I make a copy of each session after I'm done with it, by dragging it to the file server running a RAID 5.

I use a backup software package (ArcServe... yeah, I know) to take those files to tape; both daily incremental and monthly full backups.

When a project is done, I dump all but the final session from the server, then back up THAT session to a "finished project" tape.

Essentially, that puts each session in a minimum of 3 places, including 2 tape drives.

I'm debating on a new backup package... not that ARCServe doesn't work... it's just a PITA to use. I'm also considering putting a step of creating a duplicate DVD of the final session to put in a secondary on-site media fire safe... now all I have to do is come up with the money for a media safe... :)