Yes, I know this well. I don't DL anything anymore that I know I will never have a use for. Just living by this credo alone has saved much $$ and time in acquiring additional storage to save stuff that is useless to my endeavors.

When restoring the images to the physical drives make certain to restore the original drive signatures if/when re-imaging - as in, avoid using a new or automatically generated signature when restoring. Use the signature from the original backup (truimage records the original disk signatures automatically on backup, with other tools your mileage may vary...). This can help mitigate issues that would arise with apps that register themselves with hardware ID's and disk signatures, etc.

 

Last edited: Sep 12, 2025

I'm in favor of a full backup of the C:/ drive to a second hard drive. I had a frozen screen twice and had to pay Bitcoins, so I completely restored my system using Norton Ghost and the emergency boot disk.

I had Acronis and another backup program, but unfortunately, they didn't restore my system twice. It took me three weeks to reinstall everything. You should always keep in mind that restoring the C:/ drive can also fail.

Now I've bought a product from another company, created an emergency disk, and hope that the recovery will work in an emergency.
Therefore, I back up important files separately on Blu-ray and an external SSD. I even have a fireproof case containing important items/papers/photos, which should also help against water ingress.

If you have a company, you also store your company contacts, contracts, etc., outside of your office and in a safe at home.

 

This could be very valuable info. Thank you for sharing.

 

Systems are backed up on my NAS couple times a year using rescuezilla over the network.

 

but what does that help with all the problems a bunch of unsorted data causes, except that you have a backup of the chaos?

 

"Fustercluck alarm!!!" I mean I'm adrift on the same boat I'd be hoping for the samples of a given library to be .WAV; since Kontakt has a pretty robust import feature you could compress to another non-lossy format. I'm curious how non-lossy works but formats such as .flac, .OGG, come to mind.

Forgive the aimless ramble here, but I'm also thinking of attributes that have a direct effect on data like 16-bit vs 24-bit vs 32-bit, 44100 vs 48000, etc. in terms of sample 'quality' I'm compromised by a serious valley in my frequency range; I was applying to a broadcasting/audio engineering school that required me to bring test results. My band was accused of being the loudest in the region and I was way too hip for ear protection.

I'd spent some months cutting thousands of 1" thick brick tiles on a screaming fast saw. Again, too hip blah blah..... well, I did at least shove cigarette butts in but..... wrong tool. I went to a Santana concert outside Baltimore....... my ears were already ringing from the saw. Santana has long been named the by-far loudest band in the world...... you're literally immersed in the music; since that night, I hear thousands of frogs, crickets, cicadas, etc. on winter nights.

Summary of this is I can tolerate well compressed samples; I can't hear the difference between 44.1k and 48k, 16- and 24-bit. You quite apparently can hear at such levels of detail. Lucky. Other ideas....... "Monolith" format on saving created libraries might allow you to toss those samples onto archive media? I should also attest to the fact I'm a recovering addict....... "one is too many and a thousand never enough" is partly responsible for my probably 400,000 one-shots and loops About 80% of that mess is Latin percussion one-shots to feed the salsa monster I persist in nurturing