I see, for example, that Track Presets are saved in C:\Users\William\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg.
Is there a sane way of backing up Key Preferences, Track Presets, etc.?
Hi,
Cubase Preferences folders are:
Mac: ~/Library/Preferences/Cubase X
Win: %appData% \Steinberg\Cubase X_64
Where the X is the Cubase version (for example 13).
Here is the most extensive article about the Cubase preferences, I know of.
Just back up the entire system drive with a software that lets you browse the backed up folders and files.
Backing up the drive only defers the search for where to find these files.
C:\Users\USER\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\Cubase 13_64
Ok. But you were asking about backing up the stuff right?
Yes, but Iâd like my backups to be sane. If you back up the entire system drive, youâre going to backup gigabytes of browser cache files and other cr*p that is utterly useless and wastes untold space on your backup drive. And good luck finding anything when you need to restore. At the very least if you confine your backup to âŚ/Documents and Settings and âŚ/USER/Appdata/Roaming, your backups will be a fraction of the size and youâll have a prayer of finding what you want when you need it.
And then one day your system crashes, hd dies. How do you plan to deal with this? Reinstalling everything from scratch? And how about your content? The VSTs with huge libs involved? I think what @MattiasNYC suggested is at least equally sane 
Well I think storage is very cheap these days. Iâm not trying to push you to use my methods or services but just some food for thought:
My âfasterâ backup is to an internal 14TB drive using Macrium Reflect. It runs every day and backs up my system drive, work drives with projects and video files and work downloads, and my library drive.
My slower backup is to Backblaze (cloud). Backs up the same.
In both cases I can search for individual files. With Macrium I can mount the image of the sys drive and itâll appear as folders and files in the regular Windows interface. With Backblaze thereâs a web interface and searching is a bit slower, but on the flip side storage is literally unlimited and also accessible (for download) on my smartphone.
At the very least Backblaze, at a cost, is unlimited storage, searchable and reliable in my experience.
Been there and did that. It was fine.
I really canât emphasize enough how important it is to back up your system drive. Youâll be soooooo bummed if it fails.
OK, but what has preventing me to do so until now is the MS activation, among others. Letâs say that my main SSD drive (the one that has the Windows installation) suddenly diesâŚ
What happens if I restore a system backup with Macrium (or an equivalent) on a new one ? Is the Windows activation still valid, and what about other protection systems (third party plug-ins, etc.) ? I keep on thinking (but I could be wrong - please correct me if so) that a reinstallation of all what are depending on a protection scheme is mandatory anyway, making a system backup as a relative usefulness solution to me.
I am asking this while carefully keeping all what are installers, key activations, etc.
Pulling from memory now; the MS Win install is still fine if youâre using an account that is based on the cloud. In that case if you have a problem with it then worst case scenario you can access your account from another device and âdeactivateâ the old driveâs installation and reactivate from the new one that was restored from backup.
As for other items you may indeed need to fiddle with them as well, but I think it really depends on what youâre talking about. With SBâs system you can again deactivate online and reactivate on the computer and Iâm betting for some other 3rd party stuff itâs the same. In some cases perhaps you need to run an installer again or contact the company.
I think you meant âuselessâ above, right?
In my opinion it is better to think of it as âwhat do I have to lose?â. If it is true that you may have to reinstall some software that still means that some other software does not have to be reinstalled, meaning you may save some time this way.
In addition you might not use all of that software for the project that is most urgent (Iâm not sure if you do this for a living btw.) so you might only need to fiddle with one or two plugins or whatever before youâre up and running again instead of also having to reinstall an entire OS.
Which leads me to things like settings of the OS and all of the software youâre using. Again, reauthorizing might be a pain in the neck but on the other hand if youâre still able to use old settings thatâs a win in my book. New installs means fiddling with settings again.
Then there is everything else that isnât immediately obvious. What if there is a folder somewhere and you forgot that you needed to back that up. Getting the entire drive backed up will restore that folders as well. Might have been something not related to work or your hobby but still had value and was two years old. You forgot about it and now itâs gone.
And lastly, even if you have to completely reinstall everything you would still have a drive with everything that your sys drive had on it. In other words things like that folder I mentioned, all the various settings, everything, would live somewhere where you could access it and manually copy-past things if needed. Just mount the connect the backup image and browse it.
The âlossâ you potentially see by paying for a system backup drive or service and you then can not use it restored is to me really small ($ or money). The potential benefits large.
1 Like
Sorry for all the text.
Donât be. I am learning from it and will answer in a further post. 
I actually forgot one thing: There is a difference between just backing up all the data on a sys drive versus actually cloning it or creating a clone from a backed up image.
In the latter scenario all data should be restored exactly as it was on the original so that if you have two drives of the exact same make and model the restored / cloned drive should look exactly the same to the OS with the only difference being the serial number of the drive itself. That probably cuts down on the amount of software that needs a reinstall since not all will use the serial itself.
Which means, if I understand well, that I should have created an MS account when I installed Windows 10, five years ago. The problem is that I didnât. 
Yep, but another issue arises, then : is it safe to reinstall a given software over an already existing âdeadâ installation ? Iâm not sure that Windows is able to uninstall safely a software for which the protection scheme has been broken. Beside this, how does Windows cope with its own registry, in this case ?
Probably. If you know a little french, what I was trying to say is :
⌠rendant la solution du backup système dâune utilitĂŠ relative, Ă mon avis.
IOW, I was saying that the system backup system was kind of useless if all the protected software items had to be reinstall again, with the issue I stated above about the uninstallation and the registry.
No, I donât : pure amateur, here, so there is no issue about an eventual urgency, DAW related.
This is interesting, as I thought until now, that any system backup (either with Macrium or something else) should be restored in one block with no choice allowed.
From which my belief about the restore in one block : I have always thought that a backup solution such as Macrium was just doing a clone of the system drive. Something to look in a more âin depthâ way, thanksâŚ
Actually, what Iâve been doing until now is a periodic and complete backup of the followings on an external SSD. I have two accounts on my setup (an administrator and a âdaily userâ one) and two drives. For the C:\ one :
- C:\users\[admin]\AppData
- C:\users\[admin]\Documents
- C:\users\[admin]\Images
- C:\users\[admin]\Downloads
- C:\users\[dailyUser]\AppData
- C:\users\[dailyUser]\Documents
- C:\users\[dailyUser]\Images
- C:\users\[dailyUser]\Downloads
And for the D:\ one, almost everything (especially personal data, all my Cubase backup settings and projects), excepting all the libraries that can be reinstalled without hassle.
All this, knowing that if any problem should occur, Iâm for a complete Windows 10 and all the software reinstallations. After five years of use, my system still works as day one, but⌠
All this said, I think we are slightly off topic, at this point, sorry⌠
Yeah I can see why you would think that. But basically it can create an exact clone to a separate drive that you can put in a drawer somewhere, or it can create images of your drive that you can then use to restore the entire drive, or it can create images that you can browse and then access individual data. Pretty flexible.
Good to hear youâre backing up already though. As long as you have what you need backed up!
1 Like