I’d like to see auto-save have an option to alternate between two drives. I tend to manually switch drives every half hour or so. But even then, a drive failure could cost me. I may be a little paranoid about drive failures. Two completely separate drives feel safest, beyond having a mirror drive setup the depends on a single system that potentially could take out both drives.
Any thoughts on this, anyone? Maybe steer me to something I’ve not considered?
Honestly, I think you can pretty safely use a mirrored setup. A system failure that ends up destroying data on two mirrored drives seems very unlikely. You could have the system go down as a whole, but that wouldn’t be any different from now, so I would recommend just mirroring your drive instead.
Or, if you’re paranoid, you could also do a RAID5 for different safety, though that requires more drives than two of course.
Personally though I’ve used one or two independent work drives for years now, and back up once per day on a large drive plus to the cloud. I have a shortcut on the desktop to trigger backups if I feel like it. It’s only one double-click away. The automated backups are all in the background and incremental (well, more complicated than that, but nothing is deleted).
In my experience the drives that have failed have all been somewhat old hard drives and mostly Seagate. By somewhat old I mean 3+ years or so. Not really old, but old enough to have seen some use. SSDs I’ve never had fail on me. Western Digital has been good. Also, all work drives are SSD of some sort (now NVME) and the backup drive gets replaced every 3 years roughly as my needs grow or I just want a new, clean backup drive.
So I would recommend automatic backups to a dedicated drive, I would probably skip doubling up the way you do, but if you want redundancy ‘all the time’ then I’d either mirror drives or set up a RAID 5 array… and add cloud backup to that…
2 Likes
Actually, one more thing: I’d be a little bit worried about default folder paths for audio files etc. when using alternating drives. In other words I wouldn’t want to have to keep track of what newly created audio files go to what drive and which project file is the latest. It seems like a recipe for bad things happening by accident.
1 Like
Thanks much. I have had one SSD fail. Never a Samsung, though, it was Corsair that I got on sale.
I think I’ll try Neundo auto-save that sticks to one SSD drive, and add a shortcut manual save routine for the project as incremental that I’d do several times a day to a different drive. Something along those lines. Audio files are backed up manually when needed.
I’m a composer/arranger. Most time is spent in midi-land, but then some parts are committed to notation for live players in Dorico. I do mix (committed audio rendered from midi along with stategic live parts), and that is primarily in Atmos 7.1.4 mainly because it winds up being best for me even in stereo speakers from a binaural fold-down that is checked constantly and leaned towards during mixing. (I think I remember you from early Atmos threads on this forum). Thanks again.
The main problem, however, is that the backup file (.bak) is of no use to you if you don’t have all the files in the Audio and Edits folders as well. Nuendo would then have to mirror two drives. This takes a lot of copying time. Especially for projects with 500 GB of audio.
Buy a good backup software that will automatically back you up at certain intervals. This can also be hourly. There are also synchronization programs that synchronize the backup after every small change.
1 Like
Oh, good point on the .bak file needing the support files. I back up audio files manually as I get them all at once, I’m not running an audio session. But the edit files… you are saying that I’d loose my mixing data if I had to rely on a .bak file that is on a separate drive? If so, I’ll need to think about this carefully. Automated incremental backups in the background per Mattias’ suggestion may very well be the way to approach. I knew I’d get some good insights on this, thanks.
If you make small changes to the audio data, shorten it, edit it, this information is in the “Edits” folder. While the unedited audio data is in the “Audio” folder.
Therefore, storing the .bak files separately on 2 disks is pointless. You always need afull backup.
I’ve already had an SSD fail because a chip couldn’t calculate until 2014. If you then have the same disk twice, the backup is also broken. You should therefore always back up to another medium, SSD, HD, from another company or type.
I appreciate the recommendations and will be getting them implemented.