How do y'all back up your work?

P

Ptron

New member
I like to save an un-messed with version of all the songs I record, I.E. just the original tracks. On CDR, this usually means two sometimes one song per disc in bundle format. I've even got a few that are only 8 tracks, but long songs, that won't fit on a CD, although these are 24/96, which I've since stopped recording in. Since 80 percent of my recording right now is dubbing down years worth of old anolog stuff, I'm filling up the hard drive fast! What do you do? Do you just hope your hard drive never crashes? Buy a new one when it's full? Trash your tracks after everything's mixed? Fork out for DVD-R?

Ptron
 
All of your suggestions to yourself would work. There is also the option of telling Sonar to save each projects files in a different project folder. This will allow you to back up the individual files to CD-R without wasting space, although if you have a single track that's longer than your CD, you will still want to buy that DVD-R....

;) Q.
 
Get yourself a second hard drive.
120GB drives are cheap as chips now. If you fill that up, pull it out and install another one.

Personally I can't be arsed with the hassle of burning 700MB cds and having dozens of them floating around the place
 
I've been dragging them straight out of the cakewalk projects folder and straight into a CD burning program and just firing away like that. Seems to work. If they are too big, divide up the audio track among two disks. DVD would be ultra super duper crazy fantastical stupendously nice.
 
Like Tubey sez, I put all raw .wavs and project info on CD-R. If the project is too big to fit on a single, I break it up and use as many CD-Rs as it takes.
 
DVD-R/DVD+R would be my choice. The drives are WAY down in price (the latest dual-format Pioneer can be had for just over $140), and the media can be had for around $1 a disc. Not bad when it comes down to it.

Of course, to have an online backup (i.e., RAID 1) isn't a bad idea either, but fairly I/O intensive (unless you have a dedicated hardware RAID controller, I'm not talking about the software-driven junk included on motherboards).
 
moskus said:
Use Project-Per-Folder. Burn the whole project-folder. End of story. :)
Click to expand...

And if the info in the folder exceeds 700mb, big deal. Put the remaining files on a second CD. Reconstruct the folder if you want to go back to it. Also, you should be using a second hard drive for audio data anyway, but not for archiving. They have a shelf life. And if they crash, how many projects have you lost?
 
I have 3 hard drives...60g for the operating system, 80g for audio, and an external 80g for backup. The external is a duplicate of whatever is on the audio drive. At the end of a session I do a quick defrag, and then just copy whatever was changed (during the session) over to the external.
Chances are slim that both audio drives would crash at the same time. Seems pretty safe and I don't have to fuss with burning, labeling and organizing backup cd's.

Terry Kingen
 
get a file compressor like winace or winrar and compress the files so they fit into a 6-700mb file (which can be transferred onto a cd-r).
 
Tube.. you have me thinking now...

With mp3 compression it actually modifies the file... with compression tools like WinZip etc, it looks for common strings repleces them with a smaller string or something like that, meaning that when it is uncompressed it is restored to its original state.. but in saying that, if the file get's corrupted you would be stuffed... why put all your eggs in one basket sort of thing.. mind you the same thing applies if you scratch a CD?? Always make more than one copy!!

Porter
 
I normally just make a .BUN or .CWB file, open a low-level disk editting tool and view it in binary. Then I can just write down all the "1's" and "0's" on my notepad. I then photocopy the pages and put them in individual folders. I have these stored off-site by a professional data warehousing company.

Sure - it takes a few pens to backup one file, but this way I am SURE that my backup medium can't be corrupted and it is SO much cheaper than DVD-R or even CD-R!!

:) Q.

Oh yeah - restoring can be a little tedious using this method...
 
Qwerty said:
Sure - it takes a few pens to backup one file, but this way I am SURE that my backup medium can't be corrupted and it is SO much cheaper than DVD-R or even CD-R!!
Click to expand...
A really good idea! LOL! :p

The backup will last virtually for ever!


If only the .bun-format would too... :D :D
 
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