Recording Your Sessions To Dropbox

[brianhood]

Hey guys, I've been experimenting with recording and mixing my sessions straight to dropbox, and it's been absolutely fantastic for me. I always have a copy of the session in "the cloud", and since I have a 1,000 gig storage limit, it's more than enough for all of my active sessions. This is as close to it gets to a "real time" backup.

Once I've finished up a session, I shoot it to my two backup drives and delete it from dropbox. The most helpful part is that I always have access to songs wherever I am in case the band requests something from me (or in case I want to edit from my laptop in a coffee shop somewhere).

Have you guys tried this yet?

 

[BassTard]

Sounds good. Thanks for the recommendation!

I imagine it's not any slower, because it saves to your local hard drive first. But I'm curious about the background-upload...
Are you staying connected to the internet all the time? How many tracks are you recording at once?

Thanks again!

 

[brianhood]

Sounds good. Thanks for the recommendation!

I imagine it's not any slower, because it saves to your local hard drive first. But I'm curious about the background-upload...
Are you staying connected to the internet all the time? How many tracks are you recording at once?

Thanks again!

I've done this while recording drums, which is typically 12+ tracks at a time. The background uploads have never been a problem for me! I'm connected to the internet 100% of the time.

 

[BassTard]

Cool, I'll give it a try.

 

[egan.]

I haven't tried this with music sessions but I have with post and it worked fine. I'm also grandfathered in to the "packrat" option so even after I delete a session it's infinitely recoverable. Obviously I wouldn't depend on that as a long term storage solution but it's come in handy on a couple of occasions.

 

[KillFrenzy]

I though of that but my connection sucks big time, so I only do physical backup on an external HD and a backup of the project files to Dropbox. Imagine uploading a 2GB recording session at 60kb/s upload rate limit.

 

[TRUIE]

^^
Was wondering about this too... the idea is pretty cool, but you need an insane upload rate or it will take forever to upload the audio files.
Is the upload rate any better when using Dropbox Pro or is it already maxed out to your connection limit with the "free" Dropbox ?

 

[Jordon]

I've been doing this for a while, and haven't had any issues. It's actually come in rather handy when I feel like getting some work done at home.

I actually started this a few years back when my band was in the process of writing a new record. It made collaboration incredibly easy.

 

[KillFrenzy]

I do use Dropbox with clients for exchanging files, but for my daily recordings it'd be a PITA, given my crappy connection.

 

[mva801]

I've thought about this as well. I work often at 2-3 different studios plus from home, so I think in my situation it would just be too much downloading/ uploading/ syncing at each of the various studios I'm at. I'll prob stick to the hard drive option for now.

Although, I am writing demos with a buddy of mine in a different city. I was thinking about setting us up with a shared dropbox folder so we'd each have constant access to the same demos

 

[mickrich]

I use dropbox for uploading anything I want access to anywhere or for sharing mixes and DDP images with clients.
The problem with using a large dropbox "folder" as the main recording drive is that my macbook pro will sync to the folder every time I turn it on and fill my hard drive with sessions from the studio.
Logic has integration with gobbler where you can save the file to gobbler and your main recording drive and the gobbler cloud will sync with your drive.
If you want to use the session at home, you can download it, save changes and it will resync to the main session when you open it in the studio.
I haven't tried it myself, but in theory, it sounds good.
https://www.gobbler.com/logic/

Anyway, when I'm not in the studio, I'm on my own time and don't do any studio work.
If anyone wants something done, I tell them what slots I have available to do the job.
In the past, I used to do things from home but was constantly taken advantage of so don't do it any more.

 

[brianhood]

I use dropbox for uploading anything I want access to anywhere or for sharing mixes and DDP images with clients.
The problem with using a large dropbox "folder" as the main recording drive is that my macbook pro will sync to the folder every time I turn it on and fill my hard drive with sessions from the studio.

You can select which folders actually sync with each computer! Just go to your Dropbox preferences, then to "account" and change the settings to the "selective sync" option.

The way I have it right now, I only have a few sessions synced on my laptop, and I have literally everything from dropbox synced to my Mac Pro (since I have about 8TB of HD space). This keeps my laptop uncluttered with files I won't need. If I ever need something that isn't synced, I can just change my selective sync options, and it will download it onto my laptop dropbox folder. I can then "unsync" it when I'm done, and it will delete it from my laptop, but it remains in my dropbox.

Right now with Dropbox, I can open a session at a coffee shop in my laptop, set up a mixing session (or edit, or whatever I'm doing that doesn't require my monitors), then I can go back to my control room and open the session and pick back up exactly where I left off on my laptop. It's fantastic.

I will clarify that my download/upload speed is about 90mbps/5mbps here (and Google Fiber will be here within the next year or so)

 

[torqueofficial]

I have been doing this as well. Works great and as you said it gives me the flexibility to have my records with me everywhere.

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

I have a decent connection (75/75 mbps) but not that much space so meh, I'm fine doing it the way I do it.