Recently one of my friends lost all of his projects after years... He could not recover because files were corrupted. He was too depressed that he was like dying. Hard drives and solid state drive are not reliable. They all age and suddenly they die.

I want you all to back up your projects to the cloud now!

I will give you a tutorial for free google drive, it is very easy, and it does not take much time.

1. First, to speed up uploading, try to organize your projects and separate the projects you don't care about from the rest (move them to another folder in your computer). You can remove unused media files from inside your DAW if you don't normally do. Also, you can remove older versions of project files if they are big.

2. Download the backup and sync software from here and run the installer. (disable your firewall to allow drive communicating)
https://www.google.com/drive/download/

3. After installation login into your google account.

4. Then there is dialogue asks you to select a folder to continuously backup. Select the projects folder. Unselect documents, desktop, pictures for now (probably you don't want to back up those for now).

4. Accept and skip the next dialogues.

5. Now backup starts. Let it go (based on your speed and projects size it may take some time).

6. The benefit of this software is that it automatically backups your projects to cloud every time you make some changes to your projects folder. In addition, it keeps the original structure and it supports resuming and pausing uploading (in case of internet connection loss)

 

Last edited: Jan 20, 2019

On principle you're right, but even Google Drive uses hard drives, so... (at least afaik).
The only benefit I see in these kinds of backup (and why I do it) are that they are safe in the case of burglary or fire.

 

But they constantly monitor the health.

 

I had a 3 TB WD black suddenly stop working literally 10 days before the warranty expired about a month ago. Luckily i had about 90% of the contents backed up onto other hard drives but it made me realise that i had so many TB's of data scattered across about 15 different drives and 3 seperate computers that i no longer had any idea what was backed up, what wasn't and no idea how to find anything any more.

So i started researching NAS boxes and, as usual, what started out as a simple plan to just organise my disk images has gone crazy.

I now have 2 Qnap NAS boxes with 24TB of WD red nas drives and a UPS to power them both is due to be delivered in 3 days.
I also got another couple of SSD's and merged two of the computers into one, so there are no spinning rust drives in my computers.

One of the nas boxes is the file server and also stores the backup drive images for the SSD's. The other one syncs to the first so i have a fast raid file server and a backup raid for that.

This is going to be complete overkill for most people but i've been using computers for 3 decades now and you store a lot of stuff in that amount of time.

I looked at using some cloud backup but it would take too much time to upload it all.

I would advise anyone using a cloud backup for files to encrypt what you upload, google has a habit of scanning anything going through their systems. They used to do that with gmail.

 

Do not scare people for no reason. When someone losses all of his/her projects that is a disaster. Scare them to back up not the reverse.
https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2450387?hl=en

 

I'm not trying to scare anyone "for no reason", i'm just advising them to be careful, exactly as you are.

Google scans all the data you upload to them for virus's, malware and illegal content. They will also block downloads of any content they deem to be a virus or abusive or illegal content. It takes just one mistake on the part of google for some of your content to get flagged incorrectly and you may not be able to download it again.

All you need to do is make a password protected rar file before upload and you're safe.

Thats not scaring people, its just giving them some way to protect their data in the cloud.

 

oh my goodness really? what to do, what to do , Uhmmm Nah do not use cloud for anything, if they get Hacked or Under Attack then what?
it could happen

 

Hard drives are so cheap these days. Just have a backup hard drive. Why overcomplicating things with Internet backup. Both drives cannot die at the same time. The probability of that happening is around the same as a meteor striking you down while chilling on the beach or something.

If you want to be really paranoid, go buy a cheap NAS and set up a mirrored RAID with 2 or more drives.

 

USB thumb drives and SDHC cards are cheap these days, even quality Samsung or Sandisk as long as you're not using counterfeit products.
I'd recommend to compress the backups into smaller files, index them, tag them and use these for nothing else than the backup purpose.
For my own creations (and these are rather in the megabytes size range), I always back up to two different media, more or less regularly.

@SineWave
I've once had two of four hard drives break down almost simultaneously, one after around 400 days, another one 2 days later. IBM (today Hitachi) Laptop drives

 

Best answer. People here want to be like oldies. All of the computer and IT scientists try to improve technology but some people just resist against anything.
Probability of under attack <<<<< Probability of hard drive screw up.

Cloud is free. You can even create multiple accounts and upload multiple times (if you are paranoid)

 

Last edited: Jan 20, 2019

Ohhh I've been through this. 4TB HD, all my keepable stuff ...Toasted. Now I just do what SineWave mentioned and have about 11TB sitting in a closet, while an 8TB drive is "hooked up" to the PC. And if the 8TB drive catches on fire, I laugh, and walk to the closet to retrieve goodness lying in wait after I grab a new 8TB victim to enslave Muhahahaaaa

 

You should never have projects older than 6 months max, really 1 month. Get that shit out the door and move on soldier. LIFE is for the LIVING. Holding on to the past is a fools game. Produce and reproduce...

 

Older projects can be inspiring....we're talking about art here.....not about being unable to move on from a GF you broke up with 10 years ago.....

 

Art huh, ha, huh, check out a guy named Bach, crank man that's what counts. Hanging onto a project and revising it ad naseum is a fools game. Art is NEVER finished, so if you want to get paid, finish it and get it out the door. It takes balls to release and release, trust me...

 

I still have Yamaha MT-120 4-track masters in the closet ...This soldier is still fighting the battle of nostalgia

 

If I'd do that I'd be screwed. I'm constantly pulling up projects from 7-8 years ago because of nature of my job. If you take your work seriously you will keep backups as long as it's possible.
That's why I have mirror backups on 3 external drives and replacing them with new drives every 2-3 years.

 

My friend Delia was collecting seashells at the seashore. She had just gone to the electronics store to by a few extra hard drives because both of her's in the studio began making clicking noise and she felt that they both were going to quit on her soon at the same time, oddly. She had called me totally stressed out and worried that all of her hard work producing over the years would be lost, but before going home would hit the sand and blue waters of the Mediterranean to calm down and regain her focus. That is when the tiny meteorite came down from the sky and killed poor Delia. Not only did I loose a good friend, but when her band tried to recover the data from Delia's drives they were both corrupted and mostly useless. A tragedy all around. What is the moral of the story? You decide.

The Lady has spoken.

 

Just want to say.. rest in peace to my old Hitachi, which sadly passed away two days ago. If you are reading this - the important stuff has been backuped on a WD.. now looking for something to replace you. It will never be the same, though..

Seriously, cloud storage has pros and cons, like every other damn thing. Good natural disaster/theft/.. proof backup, as any serious provider must have 2-3 different backup servers (+mirroring on each) in different places around the world. The downside is so called increased surface area, that can be compromised. This factor is more important for big companies/agencies.. just encrypt your stuff, and there should be no problemos.

(Not so) funny thing. Every time a debate like this emerges, it hits me - how easy is to lose the data and how difficult is to destroy it.

 

Moral: That she wasted her time with archival matters, when indeed she, alternatively, could have been been tucked away from any micro meteorite tragedy in her well armored studio, composing the symphony of her life instead That was beautiful @Lois Lane

 

I feel so, so much, so baadly related lol

And especially "train" the reproducing thing....
... wait, that was about music..?