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02-24-2010, 09:59 PM
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#1
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Sydney, Australia
Posts: 3,955
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today is the day you BACKUP ALL YOUR MUSIC
seriously. buy a cheap USB drive, and copy anything you care about to it.
update it once a week.
your hard drive has a 10% chance of dying this year, and data recovery is way more expensive than you think. stop putting it off!
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02-24-2010, 10:32 PM
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#2
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Perth WA
Posts: 417
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Words from the wise. even better give a friend a drive full of your backups to keep at his/her house in case your house burns down! (touch wood)
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02-24-2010, 10:33 PM
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#3
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Duluth, MN
Posts: 1,712
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VERY good advice!!
To build on that... do DOUBLE backups (and give them proper drive names!) I recently lost 4 years worth of project files by doing an accidental format on an external drive. DEVASTATING. Luckily I had most of them "finished" and on CDs.
Lesson learned: Rename important drives to 'DONOTDELETE' and set a system scheduler to do automatic backups at least once a week. Also, put your external drive in a safe place (ie: behind your desk) and label the USB cord so you know to keep it plugged in.
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02-24-2010, 10:33 PM
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#4
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 22,567
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I do it every night
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02-24-2010, 11:17 PM
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#5
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Sydney, Australia
Posts: 3,955
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i've had two big hard drive failures in the last two years. i did lose part of my sound effects collection (backup was incomplete, oops), but i'm yet to lose any music i've made.
i've seen bad stuff happen, though. a friend of mine had two USB drives die in the one week, and lost months worth of work on an album (he ended up just starting again from scratch).
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02-24-2010, 11:44 PM
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#6
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Scribe
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Van Diemen's Land
Posts: 12,166
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason Brian Merrill
I do it every night
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Exactly. You need to back up once a day at the very least.
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02-24-2010, 11:44 PM
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#7
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 22,567
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nicholas
Exactly. You need to back up once a day at the very least.
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yeah if its important, ill back up after a specific project obviously
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02-25-2010, 12:27 AM
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#8
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Gippsland, Aus
Posts: 516
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I store all my info in the brain no seriously, I've lost photo's and that devistating and I can imagine how devistating it would be to loose 10 years of audio ideas.
Also important to have a drive only for backup and don't be tempted to use it up with other stuff.
Carbon copy is a must.
__________________
.-. . .- .--. . .-. | .. ... | --. --- .-.. -..
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02-25-2010, 08:22 AM
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#9
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Oct 2009
Posts: 323
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Lost all my songs from around 1999-2008 in 2008. Although I had only periodically made music this period, it really sucks to lose everything that way.
It was all my fault however, as I took an impatient unnecessary risk when I upgraded my system and repartitioned some disks at the time. I probably took it for granted that I had some backups on other disks.
However, in a strange way this is refreshing. Now I wont be too influenced by what I've done in the past. For memories, like photos so to speak, its a big loss however.
So yeah. Good tip dub3000.
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02-25-2010, 08:29 AM
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#10
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: South, UK
Posts: 14,214
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AND GET ONE OF THEM OUT THE HOUSE!!!!
fires and burglars (and water damage etc..) REALLY do happen
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02-25-2010, 08:37 AM
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#11
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Posts: 305
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I have triple backups of basically everything I've done since 1997 - music snippets, images, writings and all that.
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02-25-2010, 08:57 AM
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#12
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Portland, OR, USA
Posts: 1,057
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Digital information does not exist until it exists in more than more place at once.
__________________
"A fly was very close to being called a land, 'cause that's what they do half the time."
-Mitch Hedberg
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02-25-2010, 09:17 AM
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#13
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 966
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Quote:
Originally Posted by musicbynumbers
AND GET ONE OF THEM OUT THE HOUSE!!!!
fires and burglars (and water damage etc..) REALLY do happen
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Does anyone here have any recommendations for how to do this? What services would be affordable and reliable?
My workstation is completely offline, and I know I would prefer a static online BU, a service I could simply log onto every so often after plugging my external BU drive into the web machine. I wouldn't want another monitoring svc. running in the background 24/7.
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02-25-2010, 09:18 AM
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#14
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 22,567
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honestly i wish tehre was a place i could ship a drive to and it just takes all that data and mirrors it, backs it up, etc... and then it has an online service. Cause i have like 1 TB of data thats mine, and another TB thats samples. Not sure if i can legally back up the samples.
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02-25-2010, 09:27 AM
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#15
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 2,036
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anyone use a service like Carbonite?
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02-25-2010, 09:28 AM
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#16
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 22,567
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Quote:
Originally Posted by setvice
Words from the wise. even better give a friend a drive full of your backups to keep at his/her house in case your house burns down! (touch wood)
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this is a great idea as well. With storage getting so cheap, there's no excuse.
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02-25-2010, 09:39 AM
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#17
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 29,260
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I learned the hard way years ago... Now I have a batch script that copies any and all files that have been modified since the last copy to a backup folder on a separate external drive. Runs every night so whatever files were created or modified that day will be copied over to the backup. Its not if, but when..
Karbo
__________________
Music is what feelings sound like.
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02-25-2010, 10:20 AM
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#18
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Sep 2009
Posts: 1,430
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dub3000
seriously. buy a cheap USB drive, and copy anything you care about to it.
update it once a week.
your hard drive has a 10% chance of dying this year, and data recovery is way more expensive than you think. stop putting it off!
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I have solved this problem a big while ago by buying two 640 gigs external western digital hard drives + Second Copy 7 software (cheap and VERY nice sync software...way better than 100% of what's out there, a pity that it is so unknown)
Laptop syncs automatically in redundant copies automatically. I have never lost anything ever since and considering that makes 3 copies of everything...what are the odds everything breaks down at the same time? probably close to being hit by lightning in a sub.
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02-25-2010, 10:39 AM
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#19
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 256
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Quote:
Originally Posted by setvice
Words from the wise. ... (touch wood)
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Ewwwww. Too much information.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason Brian Merrill
I do it every night
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DEFINITELY too much info.
__________________
I used to worry that I had cloth ears. Then I realized they were only painted on.
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02-25-2010, 12:34 PM
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#20
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Ontario, Canada
Posts: 399
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I backup to two alternating external drives. My backups are complete, bootable, exact clones of the PC drive, including files that are locked (in use during the backup) which would normally not be backed up (such as the registry files).
I use XXCOPY (xxcopy.com) to backup the files (which sets the NTFS file ownership, security, and dates to match the originals), and File Access Manager (vwsolutions.com) to allow access to the locked files. The files and folders on the backup drives are just like the originals - not some proprietary compressed backup or incremental format - so it's easy to replace just a single file if needed.
An excellent solution. After a drive failure, I simply install the backup drive into the PC and go.
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02-25-2010, 12:41 PM
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#21
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: stuck in transition
Posts: 1,870
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there's a 5x10 storage unit in town that's holding my terabyte drive. It's climate controlled
ha!
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02-25-2010, 01:00 PM
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#22
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Silicon Gulch
Posts: 544
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.
Those who have read my Win7 posts know that I use basically a rotating system of three drive "clones" for backup. Much like Greg's method. (Intermediate backups are not actually always clones, but new files are copied to save time versus complete cloning). I also use Raid_1 drives as one of the three sets on some of my systems at this point (so one of the three drives is actually two drives). The rotation evens the wear on the drives and also protects against the chance of failure during the backup process (which has happened to me more than once).
The third copy is rotated to a Wells-Fargo bank vault (I rent a vault box as part of my account for about $200 per year). I am serious about protecting my more "valuable" (to me) files. The trip to the nearby bank is done Monthly (in theory).
.
__________________
Inundated by a Perfect Storm of Gluten-Free Artisanal Bespoke Quinoa Avocado-Toast Toilet Paper.
Mahope Kakou (Later Dudes)...
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02-25-2010, 03:05 PM
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#23
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: South
Posts: 1,211
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Every time i work on a project i make a backup on a 60 gb usb drive.
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02-26-2010, 08:46 AM
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#24
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Croatia
Posts: 24,790
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Yeah.
My system drive collapsed last night. My music is safe, but my 250 GB Seagate/Maxtor which has windows and all my VSTs and programs on it is slowly dying out.
First, I couldn't load Windows, it would come to the point where it should show "welcome", then BSOD saying FATAL ERROR STOP at some memory address.
Bad sectors. And I mean bad sectors right in the Windows folder! Then I tried to repair Windows installation. It wouldn't recognize the hard drive! It just said "Partition 1/2 [UNKNOWN]". Just to let you know, instead of [UNKNOWN] it should've said NTFS! That means that master boot record was corrupted. Argh.
Then, I had to go to sleep, and imagine how hard it was to get myself to sleep. I didn't do a backup of system partition, like, never.
In the morning I visited my friend, he swept through the HDD with HD Regenerator made by some crazy Russian guy Dmitriy Primochenko or something. It fixed the bad sectors and regenerated them. But alas, that didn't help, I still couldn't load Windows, in any mode.
Then we tried repairing Windows installation again. It went well till the point when it said BSOD again - PAGE FAULT IN NON PAGED AREA. Whatever that means.
Then we loaded up Mini Windows XP, using Hiren 10 boot. I copied ALL THE STUFF to my NEW 1 TB Samsung (gosh I hope that one is gonna last a bit longer!), and then we restarted and installed Windows from scratch.
After Windows was installed, I just copied my backed up C drive back (again using Hiren's Mini Windows XP) and it all worked and looked as it was. Except the fact that Windows now load FOR FIVE FREAKING MINUTES!!!111one And everything is slowed down, even Reaper ( ;_; ) From time to time I hear very short digital "zzip tick tick" noises. And I have a final thesis to do and turn in by March 12th. Argh.
I know I have to get a new hard drive. But I just blew my allowance on the 1 TB beastie.
Before you all go "but install Windows on the new hard drive!", I will say to you, thanks but no, that's definitely going to be my samples-only drive. I have to get a new HD for my system, and I'm really out of cash, and out of luck now.
Can you suggest a GOOD and STABLE and FAST (and affordable?) 250 GB SATA hard drive? I don't need it any bigger than that. 320 could pass, but when you take into account my finances, 250 is really my only option.
BTW - the only casaulties were: jDownloader, I'll have to replace the installation of that, and EZD DFH, I have to reinstall it. Yeah, forgot to tell you that D partition (which is on the same drive as C) also has some errors. :/
Argh.
Last edited by EvilDragon; 02-26-2010 at 08:54 AM.
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02-26-2010, 08:55 AM
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#25
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 1,809
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i quite like it when you lose a load of stuff,- it gives me a chance to rethink songs...
Kind regards
Dave Rich
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02-26-2010, 09:15 AM
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#26
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: UK
Posts: 3,210
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i just decided to port all my good old tracks to reaper from my old studio pc 2003 to 2008, i got 2 tracks from here then the C: drive blew out
salvaging those old tracks will be a right pain in the bum hole now
i know i had a load of important stuff on my C: drive but this bitch wont let the pc bios boot if its connected (on both of my PC's)
i have lived without it since 2008 so i'm sure i'll be fine
but yes!! please back up important stuff to another drive, you don't want to feel the depression of years of lost work!!
Subz
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02-26-2010, 09:18 AM
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#27
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Afford Slaughterhouse, FL
Posts: 624
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- Use an internal RAID1 in your PC (mirroring disks).
- Backup to an external RAID1, eg http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509. This unit in particular is very hackable ( http://wiki.dns323.info). Suffice to say the farther apart your equipment is, the better.
- Do periodic automated backups with rsync ( http://rsync.samba.org) or a backup software like Cobian ( http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm). Mirrors are good, but complete cycling backups will preserve mistakenly modified or overwritten files for a longer time.
BTW, Ethernet has an isolated interface by design, most USB devices don't. So if you backup to an external USB drive/raid that is permanently attached to your computer and your computer is prone to power surges (eg lightning), bye bye PC will probably mean bye bye backup drive too. Always use power surge suppressors in your equipment.
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02-26-2010, 09:32 AM
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#28
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Croatia
Posts: 24,790
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pbk
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How much does all that cost?
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02-26-2010, 09:41 AM
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#29
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 1,265
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To add my two cents:
1) PRINT out everything that can be printed: license keys, addresses, bookmarks, song lyrics, arrangements, everything that is of value to you can can be printed
2) Keep old backups, do not override them, because if you got creeping file corruption (e.g. only parts of a file are corrupted, but not the parts you currently used) you override the backups with corrupted data (happened to a friend of mine)
3) Label your backups appropriate: Name, Date, any other important information (application used to create and open it[1]), etc .. (I once thought it was enough to just have them on some random HD somewhere, but boooy is it tedious to sort out what is what and from when and whether or not that was the latest version of ...)
4) Use software (e.g. version revision control systems, or special backup software[1]) that can ensure (via check sums) that you can verify that the backup contains exactly what you stored to it (and no corrupted data or whatever).
5) It's only really successfully backed up, once it was _successfully_ restored!
[1] Make sure you keep a backup of the software or even better make sure it is open source, so you can get at your backups without having to fight with a big company over whether or not they still allow you to use their software .
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02-26-2010, 09:48 AM
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#30
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 1,957
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dub3000
seriously. buy a cheap USB drive, and copy anything you care about to it.
update it once a week.
your hard drive has a 10% chance of dying this year, and data recovery is way more expensive than you think. stop putting it off!
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Nah my hard drive is 10 years old so I know its durable. Plus the grinding noises let me know that it still works. ;-D
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02-26-2010, 09:56 AM
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#31
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 1,265
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dub3000
your hard drive has a 10% chance of dying this year, and data recovery is way more expensive than you think. stop putting it off!
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Every hard driver has a 100% change of dying one day.
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02-26-2010, 10:07 AM
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#32
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Milwaukee, WI, USA
Posts: 395
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Question. Is it a better practice to?
a) Write an entire project to a backup drive for each backup session.
b) Write only added or modified files.
c) Synchronize the source and backup for adds, mods and deletes.
"a" takes the longest. "b" accumulates deleted/unwanted files on the backup drive. "c" seems like it would be the best solution.
I'm using Nero BackItUp on Windows XP Home. It can't do "c". Comments? Software recommendations?
__________________
End of Kelp.
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02-26-2010, 11:43 AM
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#33
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 1,082
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I also back up to cd or dvd.
I think they are probably more reliable than drives.
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02-26-2010, 12:04 PM
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#34
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jan 2010
Posts: 112
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Get a backup program like Acronis TrueImage. It makes a single file that is an exact (compressed) image of your hard drive (either a single partition or all of them) that you can store somewhere safe. You can write the backup file to any logical drive accessible to your PC including the LAN. It can also mount that backup image as a virtual hard drive so you can access individual files instead of restoring the whole partition. No fuss, no mess. A single operation backs up everything including the OS (if backing up the boot partition). In the event of a total disaster, you simply restore the backup to a new hard drive. If the partition you are restoring is your boot partition, it will boot and run exactly as it did the day you wrote the backup.
I have a 1TB SATA drive I use as a backup drive. I plug it into a USB dock, write the backup(s) and unplug it. I could put it in a safe or store it offsite if desired. It has a backup (usually two) of every partition on every PC I own. Each backup is about 75% the size of the data you are backing up.
Paul
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02-26-2010, 12:35 PM
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#35
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Between Here & There
Posts: 118
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I'd be really happy when SSD's come down in price
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02-26-2010, 01:21 PM
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#36
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Sydney, Australia
Posts: 3,955
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kelp
Question. Is it a better practice to?
a) Write an entire project to a backup drive for each backup session.
b) Write only added or modified files.
c) Synchronize the source and backup for adds, mods and deletes.
"a" takes the longest. "b" accumulates deleted/unwanted files on the backup drive. "c" seems like it would be the best solution.
I'm using Nero BackItUp on Windows XP Home. It can't do "c". Comments? Software recommendations?
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I use winmerge with some tweaked options to do option c. (just looks at file size and modified dates)
I also do full backups every few months.
It's actually time for a purge to DVD - got lots of old projects here that have been released now and they're slowing down my backups pretty badly.
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02-26-2010, 02:39 PM
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#37
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Croatia
Posts: 24,790
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No sympathizers with me? ;_;
Was my post too long :P
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02-26-2010, 02:40 PM
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#38
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 77
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Dropbox
For immediate online backup of smaller type things (license keys, word docs etc)
www.getdropbox.com
My laptop was stolen in Kenya, and all my uni work was saved in my dropbox so I didn't lose a years work!
Also useful for syncing a folder between multiple machines.
And its free!
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02-26-2010, 03:06 PM
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#39
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Tasmania
Posts: 553
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I usually backup works in progress to a portable USB drive, and archive completed projects to DVDR (or CDR a few years ago). One copy for the shelf, one copy for the cupboard at my parents place.
MP3 demos and snippets are usually gmailed to band-mates, so they're always up there "in the cloud" if I check my sent items folder. I may even start sending them to myself just for that purpose.
Not that it would be a huge blow to posterity if my stuff was lost, but I'd be sad
In the past I've accidentally formatted drives with the only copy of old demos and things of that ilk. Extremely distressing at the time, but I agree with some of the previous comments that it's nice to clean out the detritus sometimes.
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02-26-2010, 03:27 PM
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#40
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Human being with feelings
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Silicon Gulch
Posts: 544
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Quote:
Originally Posted by EvilDragon
No sympathizers with me? ;_;
Was my post too long :P
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Here is a link to one of those USB mirror drives, suitable for your audio data:
http://a-power.com/product-8776-0-1
I have the 1TB version. It cost about the same amount 8 months ago as the 2TB version does now. You could buy another to back this thing up or buy single drives so that you can keep one for local backup and the other in an "undisclosed location". With this much data full backup can take a while so incremental backup is best.
And of course, there are multiple other sources for similar systems.
P.S. - I strongly urge folks to NOT USE any kind of backup that does not store the data as the same kind of files as the original media. Clone the thing or just copy files. You are asking for tremendous grief if you make "backup images" that require any particular backup restore "tool" to recover the files.
Example: Can anybody supply me with a version of "Fastback" that will run on Win7 and restore the "fastback backup files" on those 500 floppies I have in the Garage??
.
__________________
Inundated by a Perfect Storm of Gluten-Free Artisanal Bespoke Quinoa Avocado-Toast Toilet Paper.
Mahope Kakou (Later Dudes)...
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