Time Machine has been my saviour. on several occasions. I just wish there was something as good for Windows.
FWIW, if any of you are a bit technical and familiar with version control, VCS + backup is the iron clad solution. The standard is to use with ‘Creatives’ (who use lots of binary files) is Perforce which is free for up to 5 users. Takes setting up a server on your local machine or elsewhere.
Advantage is you keep older revisions of the file in a file history, and it has notes, jobs changelists and the like. File corruption is non existent, it does check summing, and you have older versions anyhow.
Anyhow thought I’d mention …
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Since there’s some interest … the big boys (film/game studios) put the server on RAID system with hotswap and backup. Turns out small studios like us - and folks like you can do this quite cheaply. I’d encourage any professionals here to look into it.
Here’s a solution I figured out, appropriate too for a home user or professional who cares about data integrity, availability and security
- Get a Synology NAS. Super easy to administer, I’ve used them for decades. Get one that supports virtual machines (any of the +/plus versions will do this). Pay the capabilities you want, these aren’t expensive
- Run Linux in a VM, and Perforce on that. I can writeup a kickstart if anybody does this
- Put your repository on a redundant disk array on the Synology. NFS mount it in the Linux VM. Set it to Synology RAID. I have 5 disks - 4 with 2 disk failover and 1 hotswap.
- Get an extra disk - either a cheap USB or if you have spare slots, for backup. Set up the SRM to automatically back up your data.
Done! Your live files will be protected against disk failure, you’ll have version control, and they all will be backed up. Get access to the files from any computers you might have. I have this solution for a small startup studio and it works excellently.
It’s not hard, but I’m a software engineer, if you don’t have any administrative skills I wouldn’t touch it.
I keep my iPad Dorico projects separate and version them periodically with an iPadOS Shortcut that I adapted from Alan Stonebridge’s tips for Affinity graphical iPad projects.
I simply click the iPad shortcut any time I want to record a new version of a Dorico for iPad project that I just saved in the Steinberg Hub.
My iPad automatically invokes the shortcut daily to backup any projects I’ve been working on during the day.
The shortcut shown below zips the Dorico projects to a folder in my iCloud that I previously created called “Dorico iPad Backups”.
It’s all pretty simple …. and free!
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I work on all current Dorico projects in Dropbox exclusively. I have other means of backup that happen automatically on a regular basis.
Dropbox’s history is really nice in that you get a new version each time you save, so sometimes if I want to go back to a previous version for whatever reason, I’m able to grab that from Dropbox’s versioning. In addition to this, I also have an automatic backup to an external hard drive, and an online backup solution that backs up my entire system online.