Backup and archive options for musicians - a guide

[zircon]

Every few months, a friend or colleague has a hard drive failure. It seems like half the time they don't have a good backup solution in place; their work gets derailed, and they stress out. It doesn't have to be that way, so I wrote a detailed guide looking at many backup solutions from the perspective of a composer: cloud storage, automated backups, local machines, NAS, physical media, etc.

It also covers how you might approach backing up different kinds of files, such as sample libraries, plug-in data, and session audio.

http://impactsoundworks.com/backup-and- ... musicians/

You can read the full guide above, but I'll also give a quick summary of my personal recommendations here.

Cloud Storage: Crashplan is incredible. For $5/mo per machine, you get unlimited backup to the cloud. The Crashplan app is highly customizable, allowing you to include or exclude files and folders all over your computer. You can set it to run at certain times, continuously, and adjust CPU usage depending on whether you're at the computer or not.

Local Backup: I spent about $400 to build a specialized backup computer. It's basically like a NAS, but offers a lot more power and flexibility since it runs Windows. It sits 2 feet from my main machine and runs 24/7. Using Crashplan (again!), I can back up the same set of files locally over gigabit ethernet. Not only that, but it can also stream media to other devices in my house over the network!

External Drives: I use a USB enclosure with 5 mechanical drives for archiving (files I rarely use), and these drives are backed up both to the cloud and my backup machine via Crashplan. Using 1 USB enclosure with 4-6 drives is cheaper (and less of a hassle) than connecting 4-6 separate externals.

The advantage of the above setup is that my data is duplicated in two places, so even if my house is destroyed, my data is safe. The total cost is $400 for the local backup machine, about $250 for the external drive archive, and $5/mo for Crashplan. Not bad!

[Kaine]

Local Backup: I spent about $400 to build a specialized backup computer. It's basically like a NAS, but offers a lot more power and flexibility since it runs Windows. It sits 2 feet from my main machine and runs 24/7. Using Crashplan (again!), I can back up the same set of files locally over gigabit ethernet. Not only that, but it can also stream media to other devices in my house over the network!

I do the same, except I use BT Sync to do it real time, rather than waiting for a single daily backup which a lot of backup programs tend to do.

[Obsolete236871]

I have Microsoft OneDrive since it came with my students subsrcription to MS Office. Unfortunately it's not very configurable. I wanted to archive some of my files that I don't need daily to the cloud (installers, my video library etcetera), while I wanted to keep others on my local harddrive and back them up to the cloud (music project files, samples etcetera). The OneDrive settings don't really allow to define different backup settings for different folders. It acts more like a local folder with subfolders that gets doubled on the OneDrive server - so not very configurable for specific needs unfortunately. Otherwise this could fully satisfy my "backup needs".

[Chapelle]

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[Obsolete236871]

Thanks, I'll check it out.

[Numanoid]

I was looking at this list of free cloud storage:
http://www.networkworld.com/article/293 ... tml?page=2

I trust that Google and Microsoft will be around in 10 years, not sure about the others?

I don't want to upload something, and then get 3 days to download the stuff when the company goes bankrupt, and I am on holiday with no good internet connection

That list was made only last June, and already Hive has gone down, and Copy will do so May 1st

[Chapelle]

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