Yesterday, I loaded a Cubase project I that worked just fine last time I loaded it, and it was a mess. Individual track timing was way off, almost like there were random delays on each of the tracks.
I spent an hour in vain trying to figure out what was wrong with the project, until I just gave up and reverted to a backup of the CPR file from a few weeks ago that was a “known good version”, and everything worked as expected.
I’m sharing this story to remind everybody to have a multi-tiered backup and file versioning strategy. Files can (and will!) get corrupted over time for all sorts of reasons: Storage media go bad (bit rot is a thing), your software corrupts your file (every piece of software you use has bugs in it), you accidentally delete stuff, you pour coffee over your laptop and fry the SSD inside of it, etc., so you want a way to get back to an earlier version of your files!
There are all sorts of products and strategies on how to do this, and they depend on how critical those files are for you. If you’re a hobbyist, you might get away with the built-in backup and file versioning capabilities of your OS (so enable both!), but if you’re relying on your files for your livelihood, you’ll want to use dedicated, top-tier hardware and software to replicate those files into several geographic locations, using a variety of storage media (SSDs/magnetic media), and a variety of service providers. And that includes the versioning trail of those files, so that a change or deletion that’s replicated throughout your backups won’t overwrite known good earlier versions.
And, backups don’t matter, restores do, so make sure you exercise your restore capabilities, say, once a year. You don’t want to find out that you can’t restore your files when you need to!
This all sounds like a hassle, but doesn’t have to be if you set it up right.
It’s just a matter of when, not if, you lose one of your files, and then you’ll be glad to have made this investment!