Backup

[Lawrence]

I started a thread about backup methods in the Other place in 2020. It’s still active but I’m curious-how are y’all backing up these days?

[GR Baumann]

Nothing special.
1. Logic files, Flow files, SSD -> manually HD
2. Sample files, SSD -> manually HD
3. OS and other stuff SSD -> Time Machine HD

[dbh]

I have an all singing and dancing studio machine and a workstation laptop which I keep up to date for travel and as a quick swap out in the studio in case of trouble.

1. Studio machine - 4 NVme drives backup to 4 SSDs in a BlackMagic 10G dock attached to the laptop at various times through the week (every 30m for project files, once a day for archive projects, once a week for samples).
2. The laptop (along with the 4 BlackMagic SSDs attached) is backed up to Backblaze

So local copy and cloud copy plus can be back working within minutes if something happens that I can't quickly fix (and it has).

[Guy Rowland]

I need tens of TB of backup and over the last few years the dream was realised - Dropbox Business. I shared with 5 colleagues, and between us we had about 400TB of space. It was badged as unlimited, but in practice it had one - they just added whatever you needed. Everything went up there, it was glorious. Then last year they removed the "unlimited" space - 400TB dropped to 3TB each. Hopeless.

So I've gone back to more primitive ways. I have my own Dropbox Plus account that has all the day to day stuff, my Cubase project folder, all my online business files. Then I have an array of backup external drives - the last one I bought was 20TB for about £300 I think, which is pretty great. Finally I have offsite backup which gets updated every year or so when I've run out of other things to do - it's an ancient but still functioning caddy of 4x rust drives.

[Lawrence]

I need tens of TB of backup and over the last few years the dream was realised - Dropbox Business. I shared with 5 colleagues, and between us we had about 400TB of space. It was badged as unlimited, but in practice it had one - they just added whatever you needed. Everything went up there, it was glorious. Then last year they removed the "unlimited" space - 400TB dropped to 3TB each. Hopeless.

So I've gone back to more primitive ways. I have my own Dropbox Plus account that has all the day to day stuff, my Cubase project folder, all my online business files. Then I have an array of backup external drives - the last one I bought was 20TB for about £300 I think, which is pretty great. Finally I have offsite backup which gets updated every year or so when I've run out of other things to do - it's an ancient but still functioning caddy of 4x rust drives.

Exactly. Just my opinion-

1. Redundancy
2. See #1

I’ve recently moved to Dropbox plus constant drag n drop.

Sort of hilarious-I was recently asked for stems from a 2009 project-the fact that I had back up files was ultimately the only reason I got the (fairly lucrative) gig.

For hobbyists and non-professionals-do you really want to take the chance of losing baby photos/creative endeavors/monetary spreadsheets etc?? Back up!!

[soundbylaura]

1. Backblaze with the extra "never delete anything" fee.

2. 12TB NAS down in the garage, using Carbon Copy Cloner to do constant backups of my Sessions, SFX, Samples, and Loops drives over the network.

3. Three separate 1- or 2TB drives on a USB hub with on/off buttons for the above drives. I hit "ON" at the end of the day, CCC runs a backup and unmounts the drives. I turn them "OFF" at the start of the day. These drives are leftover from before I got the NAS, and are entirely redundant, but they're there so why not use them.

4. One 4TB drive I picked up on the local neighborhood message board. It was 10 years old but unopened. I use it sparingly to back up everything and store it in my neighbor's garage.

5. One 2TB drive for my Mac's Time Machine that runs constantly.

6. A stack of "archive" drives on a shelf for old projects, so I can tidy up my active Sessions drive at the end of the year.

All of them are spinner drives, no SSDs.

[Lawrence]

1. Backblaze with the extra "never delete anything" fee.

2. 12TB NAS down in the garage, using Carbon Copy Cloner to do constant backups of my Sessions, SFX, Samples, and Loops drives over the network.

3. Three separate 1- or 2TB drives on a USB hub with on/off buttons for the above drives. I hit "ON" at the end of the day, CCC runs a backup and unmounts the drives. I turn them "OFF" at the start of the day. These drives are leftover from before I got the NAS, and are entirely redundant, but they're there so why not use them.

4. One 4TB drive I picked up on the local neighborhood message board. It was 10 years old but unopened. I use it sparingly to back up everything and store it in my neighbor's garage.

5. One 2TB drive for my Mac's Time Machine that runs constantly.

6. A stack of "archive" drives on a shelf for old projects, so I can tidy up my active Sessions drive at the end of the year.

All of them are spinner drives, no SSDs.

Wow. That’s some serious backing up.

[Lawrence]

I have an all singing and dancing studio machine and a workstation laptop which I keep up to date for travel and as a quick swap out in the studio in case of trouble.

1. Studio machine - 4 NVme drives backup to 4 SSDs in a BlackMagic 10G dock attached to the laptop at various times through the week (every 30m for project files, once a day for archive projects, once a week for samples).
2. The laptop (along with the 4 BlackMagic SSDs attached) is backed up to Backblaze

So local copy and cloud copy plus can be back working within minutes if something happens that I can't quickly fix (and it has).

Ditto what I said to Laura- serious backup.

[soundbylaura]

1. Backblaze with the extra "never delete anything" fee.

2. 12TB NAS down in the garage, using Carbon Copy Cloner to do constant backups of my Sessions, SFX, Samples, and Loops drives over the network.

3. Three separate 1- or 2TB drives on a USB hub with on/off buttons for the above drives. I hit "ON" at the end of the day, CCC runs a backup and unmounts the drives. I turn them "OFF" at the start of the day. These drives are leftover from before I got the NAS, and are entirely redundant, but they're there so why not use them.

4. One 4TB drive I picked up on the local neighborhood message board. It was 10 years old but unopened. I use it sparingly to back up everything and store it in my neighbor's garage.

5. One 2TB drive for my Mac's Time Machine that runs constantly.

6. A stack of "archive" drives on a shelf for old projects, so I can tidy up my active Sessions drive at the end of the year.

All of them are spinner drives, no SSDs.

Wow. That’s some serious backing up.

You never know when a drive is going to fail, or your laptop will get stolen, or some computer security company will push an update that borks 85% of the world's computers.

[Lawrence]

1. Backblaze with the extra "never delete anything" fee.

2. 12TB NAS down in the garage, using Carbon Copy Cloner to do constant backups of my Sessions, SFX, Samples, and Loops drives over the network.

3. Three separate 1- or 2TB drives on a USB hub with on/off buttons for the above drives. I hit "ON" at the end of the day, CCC runs a backup and unmounts the drives. I turn them "OFF" at the start of the day. These drives are leftover from before I got the NAS, and are entirely redundant, but they're there so why not use them.

4. One 4TB drive I picked up on the local neighborhood message board. It was 10 years old but unopened. I use it sparingly to back up everything and store it in my neighbor's garage.

5. One 2TB drive for my Mac's Time Machine that runs constantly.

6. A stack of "archive" drives on a shelf for old projects, so I can tidy up my active Sessions drive at the end of the year.

All of them are spinner drives, no SSDs.

Wow. That’s some serious backing up.

You never know when a drive is going to fail, or your laptop will get stolen, or some computer security company will push an update that borks 85% of the world's computers.

…or reveals every Social Security number in the country, but that’s another topic.

[tack]

Then last year they removed the "unlimited" space - 400TB dropped to 3TB each.

I'm very wary of any cloud storage service that claims to be unlimited, because either they will go out of business, or they will yoink unlimited away to prevent going out of business. Unlimited just isn't sustainable. Along those lines, lifetime unlimited for a one-time payment is pure snakeoil -- a ticking timebomb.

Unless you're using it as a secondary backup strategy that won't cause much disruption or extra work when it happens to vanish.

Expect to pay somewhere around $3-6 USD per TB per month for cloud storage, or expect to be migrating between providers and retooling with some regularity.

The cheapest reasonably reliable cloud storage is where you have a buddy who lives in another city with a fast internet connection and a UPS, who you can ship a Synology NAS running Syncthing (or something along those lines) and they don't mind playing remote sysadmin for you. It's win-win if that buddy has the same offsite backup goals and you can host each other's remote storage. If I had tens of terrabytes I couldn't live without, this is what I'd do, but then I've the privilege of having a number of such buddies.

As it is, I only have a few terabytes I can't live without, so my backup strategy involves syncing key directories from my desktop/tops to my local NAS, and daily cloud backup snapshots to Wasabi at $5/TB/mo, where I keep 90 days worth of daily snapshots, weekly snapshots up to 6 months, and monthly snapshots between 6 and 12 months, in case I ever need to recover something historical.