Audio files are big. I’m not talking about little compressed stereo MP3s, but uncompressed multi-track DAW source files. And they seem to multiply like rabbits. Where do you store them all?
Each Tuesday we open our mic to readers and lurkers alike to come out of the woodwork and tell us your thoughts and opinion, your experiences and mistakes, what you love and what you hate. We want to hear from you, and here’s your chance.
Do you have room on your main hard drive for all your source files, or do you need to clean them off to external storage on a regular basis? Do you ever delete your source files after mastering?
Do you back up your files to an external hard drive, a NAS or Time Machine, a tape backup system, or somewhere else? Have you found online storage useful for backing up your source files?
Do you use special backup software or just drag and drop?
Have you ever had a disaster by losing essential files? What happened and what lessons did you learn?
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By Adrian Try
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Man oh man do those files ever add up!!
I stopped having room on my laptops hard drive so I had to buy an external drive and I transferred my WHOLE music library there. It’s a 1TB, which is MORE than enough for all my masters and such.
) Every time I finish a song, all the files go on that drive in special, categorized folders.
One time on my Dad’s old computer I had a bunch of mixes I was working on – about 6 – and it crashed once. I lost EVERYTHING, including all the vocals I had done. It was heartbreaking. I deff learned my lesson on that front.
Backup, backup and when all else fails … back up!!
I just did a sixties track with comp takes of multiple guitar tracks (4-8 each maybe), bass lines and drums. All together 450+Mb. So it’s reasonable. Any USB hard disks, cheap ones, are fine as secondary backup systems.
12 x 1TB drives
3x 1TB drives (1 System, 1 Data, 1 Samples) Backup to external Harddrive, sometimes DVD, no NAS etc. because of the risk of an electric shock.
I wish I was that creative that I actually needed 12 TB, my hat goes off to you sir. No, I just regularly backup my logic archives to an external and then delete the ones I’m not really working on at the moment from my hard drive.
I backup to external hard drive. Makes me pull my hair when I forget to remove unused files from the bins of ten to fifteen song files within my project folder in Logic. Then when i choose cleanup project, it removes almost nothing, leaving the folders unnecessarily big in size… Learned my lesson now though
Never lost essential files, I just had a bad habit of deleting projects I thought I’d never look back at again. Again, I have learned my lessons
Just a simple RAID 1 in my mac, installed with Disk Utility, where i save all of my Logic projects and other presets, like for Reaktor and such. Of course, i also backed up my boot drive with SuperDuper, so in case of a failure i don’t have te reinstall all my apps and plugins.
I think creativity can never be repeated, so working without an immediate backup is unwise.
for my current projects, i keep the source files on my main hd (seperate partition, though), but i keep all my old projects on a 1TB external harddrive. and for the stuff that is really important, i burn them on dvd’s.
12 x 1TB drives? Dayum!
I just use a small portable external for my files, about 70GB of samples.
I started getting serious about backups about a year ago — coincidentally, as soon as I got serious about it I had 4 different drives fail. I back up to external hard drives, using Microsoft’s SyncToy.
When I do multitracks I usually burn dvds as I go, and send the final files home with the band when they’re done. I had one big scare where the logic board on a drive blew — i was able to bring it back by buying an identical model drive and swapping the logic board onto the old drive. After that, I started doing backups to external drives any time I do anything I don’t want to lose.
I can’t recommend Synctoy enough, for quick backups. It’s super-simple, and it builds a uncompressed copy of your files so that you can go grab a file without using a restore utility. It’s not a full-on backup utility, but I’ve not found a free/open source backup utility that wasn’t a PITA.
There are also on-line backup systems, which is really the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyncToy
My projects are kept on an internal (non-booting) drive; samples on an external FW; finished projects on another external FW; and I use Time Machine to manually back up to a 1 TB USB drive dedicated to the purpose. I never record to my boot drive. It’s something Digi strongly recommends against.
4 X 1Tb drives in my mac pro and 2 more 1TB external fire wires. Also have a 500gb WD passport for carrying around.
Drives are so cheap now I tend to have as many as I can fit in my machines
I backup one folder called “music” to an internal (but separate – ie. not my main drive) 1Tb HDD called music – they’re cheaper than externals (no case). The Music drive has many sub-folders (eg. projects (film,album,misc), samples (midi,wav,other))
Actually I cheated a bit, that 12TB isn’t all for music, I do video too, and half of it is backups of course… but yeah as Mo said drives are so cheap these days and you get the cheapest-per-gb to go with the bigger ones so why not go crazy
I send most of my individual wavs and aiffs to projects created on kompoz.com.
Kompoz is free and also fits my needs when I need colllaboraters. Backing up to kompoz with no intention to collaborate is, in fact, unethical and severly frowned upon. I back up other projects and all settings to an external drive.
I also use Time Machine but it has limits.
I don’t really work with Audio that much it’s just MIDI mostly, with the exceptions of the samples I use.
I save everything from FL Studio as .ZIP files and have folders for
Projects — Project files (Year-Month-Day Name.zip)
Bounces — Bounces obviously
Samples —- this folder has my large collection of soul, jazz, rock etc samples
Sounds —- this folder has drums, and any other random sounds
They’re all stored on roughly 4 hard drives. One is 320GB, the second is 1TB, the third is external and it’s a 320GB, and the fourth is my Macbook 120GB hard drive.
And that’s about it.
I have 4 TB of storage on my media server. I store my files there.
Here’s how i do:
files i work with are pulled to the client machine, from a storage server ( in my nearest basement), that takes care of backups, categorizing, indexing, load-balancing and space-balancing.
The storage server is in a hp blade enclosure with some storage blades. Aditionaly there is a exact copy of the server located at the other end of the building in another basement. So if one fails, the other one takes over. I managed just recently to connect both using 4 10gbit/s NICs (fibre).
The second server is storing all data on two older dell powervaults.
Both storages are arond 29TB (raid 5, daily backup to a tapestation) each, but i am running a little low on space, right now… ( i started hosting audio for two of my friends that record about everything at least twice)
In case everything burns down, the servers each do an incremental backup every 2nd day, through the internet, to a backup service, run by a friend.
Personal files are stored on another storageblade with only 4 TB, no backup there, though :/ gotta fix that…
Verry important documents and files are on my notebook’s harddrive wich is encrypted, and a backup is stored in my bank-vault once a week.
I store my files on external drives other than the system drive. So I usually have at least one audio file volume where I keep my projects, and sometimes more than one.
It gives me the advantage of not having slow performance on my system drive, which only runs my daw, and plugins.
I also have a lacie network disk which I’m using as backup of storage files, and archived sessions, once there complete.
1TB internal drive (system drive) is backed up weekly (or more often), no DAW sessions are stored on the system drive, all audio is recorded to an external firewire drive (7200 RPM, 500GB) and backed up to another duplicate external drive that mirrors its contents every time I stop working on something
I had TWO 500GB externals crash within the same week! Luckily no Pro Tools files were on there. Now I use:
http://mozy.com – Only $5/mo.
Backs up files online while computer is not being used, and PT files are usually not that large, few hundred MBs, so it doesn’t take long for just that.
BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!!