Backups

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Hey Andy (and everyone),

When you finish an album, what do you do with the files ? Do you backup them on hard drives, and store these into a shelf, or do you give them to the band (or label or whatever) and erase them (don't keep a copy at the studio) so that's none of your business anymore ?

Thank you in advance

 

[Hopkins-WitchfinderGeneral]

When we did our first album we back upped everything on dvd and stored it in Sweden for safe keeping.

 

[Asmus_Thomsen]

I back up everything on DVD. I can't get myself to erase it, and considering the low prices on quality dvd-media - why not just make a backup, just in case.....That's pretty much it......

 

[Exsanguis]

I'm really paranoid about something happening to the album, so I usually save it to a hard drive, then burn it onto DVD as well.

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

Before burning to DVD, how do you guys deal with audio files that are not being used? Usually each one of my audio tracks has a bunch of different audio files stuck together, so it gets confusing as to which ones to save…It sucks because I end up burning the sessions to 2 or 3 cd’s, sometimes just for one song….any ways to get around this? …do you compress the files?

BTW I recently got a DVD burner so hopefully that will eliminate the problem.

 

[Kazrog]

Before burning to DVD, how do you guys deal with audio files that are not being used? Usually each one of my audio tracks has a bunch of different audio files stuck together, so it gets confusing as to which ones to save…It sucks because I end up burning the sessions to 2 or 3 cd’s, sometimes just for one song….any ways to get around this? …do you compress the files?

BTW I recently got a DVD burner so hopefully that will eliminate the problem.

Use backup software, such as Retrospect from Dantz.

 

[Razorjack]

I use a RAID system (5TB) at uni to back up my work (well, the system itself creates a backup of every project I save onto the workstation's hard drive). Every week the university backs up the whole system onto DVD's and gives us a copy. The files are deleted from the system every month.

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

Use backup software, such as Retrospect from Dantz.

Uh, too lazy to look right now....what exactly does this do?

 

[Kazrog]

Uh, too lazy to look right now....what exactly does this do?

Mainly, you can create backup sets that auto-synchronize. This takes away all the guesswork of "did I already back this file up." You can even create schedule backups. There's lots of other features too, but most of the time I just use it for synchronizing a single backup set.

I will add that most major studios are using Retrospect.

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Ok thanks for your sharings guys, but my question was actually dealing with the final backup when the project is finished, mixed, mastered, etc...

GGI : What DAW do you use ? Most programs, I guess, allow you to create a copy of your folder for backup needs, only copying the files actually used in the project, getting rid of the unused parts of the wav files, etc.

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

really? I'm on PTLE....Is it simple?

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Don't know PTLE, but check the manual it should definitely be in there

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

Looking things up in that manual is a bitch, 500 odd pages on Adobe acrobat! I gotta print that bastard out!!

 

[Lopes]

Backing up is a cakewalk (pun intended) with Sonar. You can save the entire project to one bundle file, then it's a simple burn to either a cd or dvd. It's just too bad that I was too lazy to do so and lost about two years worth of work in a hard drive crash. Granted, a lot of that work was really shitty, but it was like looking at a photo album and hearing yourself grow up. Now I have multiple backups on multiple hard drives.

Take it from me, don't learn this lesson the hard way.

 

[SickBoy]

Take it from me, don't learn this lesson the hard way.

Well, recently I almost learned my lesson the hard way.

My secondary HDD died last week and it was suddenly bursting with bad sectors. So I engaged a program called R-Studio, to recover what's left, as it was unreadable from Windows. After some 36hrs of digging, I was actually able to save my Cubase project files and luckily I didn't need anything else, cause I burned a backup of all audio and initial project files on 2 DVDs. This just saved me the pain of mixing everything all over again...
A friend of mine was making a demo album for a local band and just as they were closing to the end, his HDD died and he just had a veeery old backup. So they mostly redid almost entire recording. I'm sure he uses multiple hard drives along with DVDs now.