Oh, well nevermind then

 

don't install snaps, they're slower and bloatier than native/flatpak

 

I wish I could afford 2x8 TB of storage without having to live off of dust for two months haha, maybe next year
But obviously good advice if you have the money.

 

Care to elaborate more on the subject since I´m not so good with Linux, any tips and tricks are welcome.Thank you in advance.

 

With differential backups, if the first backup gets corrupted, doesn't everything else become worthless?
With storage so cheap and speeds so fast, complete backups are the way to go.
Nothing can compare with restoring exactly the way things were before the drive went down.
Or, if that backup happens to be corrupt, one of the the previous dozen or so full and complete backups.
Mirroring backup drives and archive drives takes equivalent space. of course as things are already compressed, but again ..storage is relatively cheap for slow backup drives.

In about 20 years of maintaining family and small business computers I have had only one corrupted backup that I am aware of (there may be other backups corrupted that have never been discovered).

 

differential backups include everything that's changed since the last full backup. if a differential backup becomes corrupted, you'd lose everything that's changed since the last differential backup (i.e. in the last day if you do daily backups), but a combination of the previous differential and last full would be all of your files that'd changed otherwise. of note is that if today's differential got corrupted, but tomorrow's differential was fine, the fact that today's got corrupted is completely irrelevant (presuming you didn't need a version of the file that only existed today).

incremental backups are similar but only store what's changed each day, so you'd lose the changed files entirely upon a corrupted backup.

your point does stand that a full backup getting corrupted is problematic when using differentials, which is why most professional backup software keeps a hierarchy of full backups, even if the weekly gets corrupted you can fall back to last week's, or the monthly, etc.

if you can manage, a full backup every day is always best, but second place is easily a differential, presuming you have the wherewithal and infrastructure. most of these strategies are probably overkill for home users though

 

a backup can be pretty useless since many devs have switched from using rhe network card to the HDD ID for protection. if you need to restore to a new drive youll be left with all those pretty icons, but most of it will be de-registered.

 

You are right but at least you have all your projects and files intact and all you have to do is re-register the few applications that needs it.

In my case, recently I had to replace my main SSD NVME and the only program I had to reregister was Studio One.

I have experienced in the past a similar issue with Spectrasonics instruments after replacing my network adapter.

 

Yeah - reregistering can be a hassle, but it doesn't take long for the stuff I use in projects.
I have run across a few unregistered plugins I had to re-register long after a restore (or a major update), but those are obviously ones I don't use much (or never got around to using at all - LOL)
I usually go through and open my favorites (at least) before doing another full backup.
No one wants to create a perfect backup of a bunch of unregistered plugins
And i only save the last few full backups for a similar reason - I don't really WANT to go back in time.

Spoiler: and blah blah blah...

I DO have a fresh install on another SSD with only my main utilities and customizations, Reaper, FL Studio, Studio One, portables and a few other programs as a good starting point for a new setup. Along the way i also saved a couple of backups sans any DAW or multimedia installs for a similar reason. They only take up 15 - 20 Gig anyway. My full backups take around 73 Gig right now for my "loaded for bear" setup.
That's with symlinking a lot of generic stuff ... like DAW libraries, etc, as they're independent of the OS and program setup.
I actually just installed my Toontrack progs on that fresh disk, but won't bother to make a backup of that.
I just wanted to verify what was necessary to be up and running with Toontrack.

 

snap packages contain more lines of code and are slower than the flapak format or appimage. just install with apt/pacman or whatever your distro comes with. Just don't use snap store or snapd

(not that they're evil, but they're worse, still usable ofc)

 

Interesting so a NAS with redundant drives is not a back up?
So a single disk via a USB port is?
I really don't know what you consider a back up?

 

one power surge and NAS is gone,
combination of multiple physical devices, at different locations, attached at different times, are.
NAS periodically cloned on external USB drive can be a backup in that regard

 

Not necessarily a single partition (RAID). When you're as experienced as I am you never do that, but make every HD/SSD a different backup unit. Just in case. RAID is terrible for backups bcs if one HD fails everything goes tits up. Parity can help but you sacrifice a drive for that and it takes a long time to build the RAID from parity. it's just not worth it and speed is not of essence over network anyway, so better to keep the drives separate. Just make a NAS with 4 or more drives and don't keep it on 24/7 but just when you need it. That way it will last you a loong time.

 

So you plug things in with out a power surge protector?
Not me bro.

 

Last edited: Mar 27, 2023

Mirror is the best solution on a NAS for Back up IMHO. Also if the NAS dies for what ever reason just put the hard drive in a Linux PC and mount Back up restored.
But I agree with you. I too have quire a few years in the IT business.

 

Last edited: Mar 27, 2023

power surge socket won't protect against thunderstorm lightning hit (been there, seen that)

 

yep, can second that. I was uninstalling some plugins with an uninstaller and made the mistake to automatically delete leftovers. Well, long story short... It deleted my whole VST2-Plugin folder.

I was able to restore most of them, but not all, so I had to reinstall some of them.
The good site of it is, I got rid of some plugins I didn´t use anymore anyway.


But seriously... ALWAYS do frequent backups, not only your projects!

 

Btw... apparently Melodyne keeps clips in a folder that, depending on your DAW, may not be associated with other project audio files. So you might want to find that sucker and back it up too.

 

I have three back ups and then a another computer that I move everything to ever so often. I learned this the hard way

 

I haven't see that yet. Anything can happen I guess.
If you really want the best back up on site and off site are the best. NAS as primary, cloud as secondary.
That's what pros do.