What's your BACK UP PROTOCOL?

Steinberg Lounge
#1

I THOUGHT I had a fairly decent protocol. Video files were immediately taken off of the camera and copied to a hard drive. The hard drive footage was then rendered to a DVD. For audio projects, I’d mirror the file I was working on. When I finished, I would also do a data backup on a DVD-R. It was/is a tedious pain in the butt to do. But it seemed to work well, until it didn’t.

I recently LOST A BACK-UP DRIVE. It was an internal drive. It worked last week. Then one morning last week, I went to copy something from it and it didn’t come online. I opened the PC and found that the cable connection had actually broken! How that happened is still a mystery. It’s not like the PC fell off of the shelf. Anyway, I tried to fire it back up on one of my hot swap bays and got a dreaded clicking sound. I ran it over to a PC repair shop to see if they could fix and/or recover the data. They could not. So they sent me to DriveSavers out in California. I braced myself for a $2700 repair estimate. Instead, I was told that they couldn’t recover the files either! :open_mouth: So, I’ve pretty much lost all of 2017/18 Family videos. It felt, in a small way, like losing stuff in a fire without the fire.

It could’ve been worse. My 1st backup drive stopped at 2012. But most of the stuff shot between then and now was still on the camera. So I CAN recover 2013 through 2016 and all of 2019 to current. That’s some consolation. The thing is, I felt safe removing files from the camera’s hard drive BECAUSE it was backed up. I hadn’t had a drive fail in 20 years! But that’s what happened. So now I’m wondering what else I could do to back up the backup hard drive. What do you guys do?

#2

I now backup my system drive to an external USB connected hard drive. Work drive(s) get backed up to:

A) a large internal HD. I try to recycle that every now and then, say 6 years or so.
B) Backblaze online could storage.

Backblaze is free and size is unlimited. One computer per account, but includes the ability to choose drives including external ones. The one caveat with it (and others perhaps) is that it is a literal backup of drives you have “online”. So this means that anything you disconnect from you system is then no longer online and won’t be backed up of course - AND it means that data will get wiped from their cloud after 1 or 3 months (I forget). So anything that you want to have backed up through them in perpetuity needs to be perpetually connected. But as long as that’s the case you’re good.

For the drive backup of my work drive I use Macrium Reflect. I also use that to create an image of the sys drive. The paid version is worth it. You can use a bunch of different options such as incremental scheduled backups etc. and you can control when to purge older data in your backup sets. Another great thing about it is that it allows a backup of the system drive while the system is up and booted. Some software forces you to run the backup from a system other than the one on the system drive…

If there’s anything specific you’re curious about let me know and I’ll check it on my system of course…

#3

I archive my completed work to 2 external USB drives and backup my running system with Macrium Reflect. On macOS this was the same except I used Time Machine.

Most people also suggest cloud backups but I have never gone down that road personally.

This has been my protocol since the CD burning days :slight_smile:

#4

Even though I don’t back up as much as I should, backups are done to 2 different external hard drives. One is kept here at the house and the other is kept at my fathers.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here, but are you saying that you only back up cubase projects once there done?

A large external SSD with the proper backup software installed on your computer should make daily, if not hourly backups painless.

#5

You are definitely misunderstanding. My Nuendo projects are automatically backed up at 2 minute intervals and at the end of each session! Same with the video projects. When the project is complete, I back it up to a DVD for archiving as well as the hard drive.

#6

I think I’ll start using compact flash drives for archival backups, as they’ll obviously hold more than the DVD disk, they’ll load faster and they’re easier to label.

#7

I use a Synology NAS. Two mirrored drives and on top of that the NAS Backs up my Cubase stuff up to the cloud. Plus you can access your stuff any where thats got a decent internet connection.

#8

I bought an external USB dual cloning docking station which allows you to use 2 drives via Usb and an offline cloning , just put your two drives in the cloner , press a button and job done . That simple .
I setup a complete fresh install on a 250gb SSD with all the programs i need ( Steinberg only ) for the DAW and then clone it on exactly the same drive so there’s always a back up if something goes wrong , projects and samples get backed up at certain increments .
Like you ive learnt the hard way coming from the early PC era of loosing too many drives with no back up . Now it’s as simple as pressing a button .

Inateck Dual Cloner dock station FC2002