Back up all tracks and moving them to a new pc?

Hi everyone, I’m about to sell my PC and it’ll be 8 months before I get a new one. I need to save all my tracks on an external hard drive (I’ve read that it’s better than backed up in the cloud). I’ve seen this video from Dom Sigalas but in his example, all the tracks have the same length whereas mine have all various lengths.
What’s the best way you’ve done that allows you to import your tracks in a new pc and have all events located at their proper place?

The first answer that comes to mind is: If you use Cubase, the project file will remember all the positions of the events so you don’t need to do that work yourself.

If you still want to create audio tracks that all have the same length, use Export->Audio Mixdown. All created files will have the length from Left Locator to Right Locator. If you have Cubase 12 you can use the Queue system to create individual stems in one go.

Yeah. Just copy all the Folders for your music Projects onto the external drive and then onto your new PC when you get it. That’s all you really need to do. Although if it were me I’d do it twice onto different disks just in case as insurance since you won’t have the originals available.

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I second @raino’s advice to have two different copies on two different media (e.g. cloud and local hard drive/SSD).

Also, make sure that any audio files your projects might be referencing are copied as well. They should all live in the Audio subdirectory of your project directory, but that’s not necessarily always the case if you haven’t always paid attention to good file housekeeping.

One way to ensure that is to use the “Backup Project” option, but that’ll get tedious in a hurry if you have more than a handful of projects.

Excellent point.

It seems to me that what you are doing introduces additional risk beyond what happens during a a normal migration to a new computer. Normally you’d have the older computer around long enough to verify everything is working on the new one. Under the circumstances I’d be extra cautious about everything. Probably a good idea to have a couple of OS level backups of your entire current computer (although that’s always a good idea).

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Yep, more good advice from @raino: Keep that old computer around, and don’t change anything on it so you can always load up an older project if need be.

I migrated from a Windows 10/Cubase 11 PC to a Windows 11/Cubase 12 PC about a year ago, and I still have that old Windows 10 PC sitting in my studio, and find myself going back to it about once a month or so when I open up an older project on the new PC and find all sorts of things that weren’t migrated properly, or that simply, and bafflingly, don’t work anymore (like Padshop not being able to recreate a sound on Cubase 12 even though it’s the exact same patch as on Cubase 11?!).

It’s a lifesaver to be able to go back to that older machine, and then be able to do stuff like render tracks with VSTs that don’t work anymore on the new PC into audio files so that I can still move those projects forward.

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Hey thank you heaps folks! Plenty of good advice there, and i’ll definitely hold on to my old pc’s hard drive if I can but having to move 25,000 km north and first looking for accommodation before purchasing a new desktop / laptop (windows or mac that’s too up for discussion), I’ll probably save everything into two different hard drives and in the cloud :wink:!