Poll: What Do You Use for Backing Up Digital Data?

[Anderton]

I'm sure many of you back up to several of these, so I made this a multiple selection poll. However, please indicate your two primary means of storage, not everything you use.

[onelife]

Tape in the old days (ten+ years ago) then CDs and now a large external HD and a combination of CD/DVD.

 

I'm not sure if any of these will stand the test of extended time. In fact, I think it's possible we were here before and most of the modern (at the time) storage media was lost. When we mean something is not permanent we may say that it is not "carved in stone". Its those things carved in stone that do and did survive. I'm not so sure this plastic and magnetic stuff we are using now is up to the task.

[blue2blue]

I answered DVD, hard drive, and recourse to pagan supplication.

[MikeRivers]

You didn't include analog tape, or punch cards.

[blue2blue]

Not all digital data translates all that well to analog tape -- as anyone who tried to get the recording and playback levels optimized on one of the tabletop cassette deck drives that was a standard add-on for the Tandy 1000 can probably attest.

 

And as someone who had a big stack of punch cards go flying in different directions when an overstretched rubber band broke at the job submission counter back in '73 when I took my first programming class, I'd be disinclined to put them high on my list. But I do have a short stack of them around in some box in the garage... just for old time's sake. You never can tell when Fortran IV is going to come back into vogue. Come to think of it, it's probably time to replace the rubber band on that one...

[144dB]

This is well-timed Craig... I was going to post a thread about the importance of back-up, based on a nightmare experience I had on Tuesday.

 

My audio PC is fine, but the laptop I use for everything else (including video editing) went south. My user profile for Windows XP became corrupt, and while I'm able to access most of my old files, there are a lot of other headaches I won't go into. Bottom line: It isn't fun, and I'm one of the lucky ones. I could have lost everything.

 

My audio PC has redundant internal hard drives for back-up, but today I'm going to buy an external USB drive as well. And I'm contemplating an on-line service as a last line of defense (e.g. Carbonite, etc.).

 

In the digital age, think about how much content you have... Digital photos, purchased music, your own music creations, videos, documents, financial records, etc. I was lazy because I never had an issue in over ten years of heavy computing, and I just got burned. Learn from my mistake, and back-up your data periodically.

 

Todd

[Paul McCartney]

Video projects on DDS tape, music projects on hard drives.

[WRGKMC]

I voted hard drive but I dont see my second method there which is the oldest method

of recording music there is.

 

The "note" book.

 

Must be a lost art in the digital age.

I back up my recorded music by actually notating tabs or notes to paper.

It may be hand written or printed, it doesnt matter.

[Beck]

I checked Hard Drive and CD-ROM, assuming you meant CD-R since CD-ROM (Compact Disc Read-only memory) is not writable... or was that a trick question?

 

I was a bit disappointed the poll did not include floppy disk. And not those new fangled 1.44 MB type either, but good old 720k double density pure analog goodness. If you could hear your data on vintage floppy disks it would sound more

[blue2blue]

Notebooks... I got a jillion of 'em left over from the decade and a half before I started mostly writing on the computer. (Even though I'm fast typist, and was largely comfortable writing fiction on the typeweirte, the amount of bit-by-bit writing, re-writing, and margin scribbling I tended to do when writing songs kept me in the notebooks -- also, of course, they're portable.

 

As I'd finish a song and lock it down, I'd often (but not always, type it up, and throw copies in a Pee Chee folder -- but the chaotic life of a hippie-cum-punk in his twenties meant those neatly typewritten songs in their folder often got coffee, beer, and tequila stained, and eventually, like the prodigals they were, frequently ended up scattered around, shoved in magazines and books, scattered to the winds. So notebooks were often it.

 

But flipping through some of those old notebooks, years later, I realize how much was only hinted at in the scribbles between the lines and to the margins, and often, with arrows drawn to the bottom or side of the page, on the back (making it dang hard to perform a piece in one swoop from those pages.

 

In 2005, concerned because most of my publicly available recorded work was ofter 'buried' in the style-of-my-moment, and that the general folk/blues/traditional country aspects of my underlying writing often disguised or buried in the idiosyncratic mix of postmodern styles that I, at the time, mostly enjoyed working in, that the natural audience for my songwriting was often put off by the synths, breakbeats, and only rarely melodic vocalisms -- so I decided I would embark on a project of recording mostly straight ahead folk/traditional acoustic versions of all my songs and posting them to a blog.

 

Also, I soon realized that, instead of a dry explanation of the songs (this here's a little song I wrote when me and my then-current girlfriend were... blah blah), it was often more fun to write a little microfiction piece that sometimes paralleled and sometimes took a long, running jump away from the song. (And I strongly suspect that many folks were more drawn to the microfiction -- since they didn't have to listen to my whiny, out of tune vocals to enjoy it. )

 

As a consequence, I now have virtually all my publicly presentable songs in one spot up on the web (of course, I have to remember to keep that backed up, too). Since I can only rarely get through more than one or two of my songs by memory, alone, that resource has come in handy more than a few times jamming with friends and even, once or twice, doing impromptu 'concerts' for my glutton-for-punishment friends. (And now that smartphones are common, it's even more convenient, since there's almost always some web-friendly device in reach.)

[MrKnobs]

I answered DVD, hard drive, and recourse to pagan supplication.

 

My answers exactly.

 

Terry D.

[MrKnobs]

I voted hard drive but I dont see my second method there which is the oldest method of recording music there is. The "note" book. Must be a lost art in the digital age. I back up my recorded music by actually notating tabs or notes to paper. It may be hand written or printed, it doesnt matter.

 

As long as you then scan the pages then recycle the notebook this is perfectly acceptable.

 

Terry D.

[Anderton]

I voted hard drive but I dont see my second method there which is the oldest method of recording music there is. The "note" book.

 

Yes, but the question was how do you back up digital data. Although I guess you're using your digits to do the writing

[Anderton]

I hope all you people backing up to hard drives spin them up occasionally...

[ggm1960]

I try to keep the most important data (in other words, that that I create) on at least two HD's but some of it may be on as many as four different drives.

If I'd looked further than the poll before voting I'd have also included USB stick because the backup I had on a 16gb one saved my butt once when something went wrong with the huge Digital Performer file I used to use on live gigs.

[144dB]

Craig,

 

I'm surprised the poll didn't include an on-line back-up service. After my harrowing ordeal noted above, I would consider Carbonite for $60/year. This would be for my business stuff, but I could just as easily archive audio projects there.

 

I don't connect my audio PC to the internet at all, but I could use a portable drive to grab the data, and then post a second redundant copy on-line.

 

Just a thought...

 

Todd

[Anderton]

I was restricting it to local data storage because of the discussing regarding that in the thread on cloud storage.

 

I just don't see cloud storage being practical for me; I have terabytes (and terabytes) of data and a 1.2MBPS DSL connection. If I download, I basically can't do email because the speed slows down so dramatically. To back up all my data would probably require my computer being online for a year

[144dB]

I was restricting it to local data storage because of the discussing regarding that in the thread on cloud storage.

 

I'm so accustomed to business-grade circuits, that I forgot that home connections are not full-duplex (i.e. full speed in both directions). Home download speeds are great, but the upload speeds are typically much slower.

 

Good point...

 

Todd

[the stranger]

I was restricting it to local data storage because of the discussing regarding that in the thread on cloud storage. I just don't see cloud storage being practical for me; I have terabytes (and terabytes) of data and a 1.2MBPS DSL connection. If I download, I basically can't do email because the speed slows down so dramatically. To back up all my data would probably require my computer being online for a year

 

Have you called lately to see what's available? I'm in the sticks and I'm getting 10MBPS (6/7 on average) DSL for like $26 a month.

[LRon Butterfly]

Hard drives - I have dozens stored in a few locations.

[Geoff Grace]

I backup to hard drives, archive to DVDs, and never vice versa.

 

(Just to be clear, I'm using the term "backup" to mean copying--duplicating--data that remains on the hard drives I regularly use and "archive" to mean offloading data and then erasing it on the hard drives I use.)

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[js1]

Gave up on DVD backup now that hard drive backup is so cheap.

 

But, I'm not comfortable without redundancy. Drives are cheap enough, and network RAID enclosures are cheap enough that I'm going to put one of those together.

 

js

[MikeRivers]

Since hard drive backup seems to be the most commonly used around here, what's your strategy? Do you use one drive as your backup drive and just keep adding to it until you fill it up (if ever)?

 

Or do you have your backups on several drives with different types of material on each? (audio projects, downloaded software that you want to keep, photos, videos, etc.

 

Or do you use smaller drives (or a self-imposed limit) so you only put a reasonable amount of material on a drive? (for example one audio client or CD project on a drive)

 

How do you connect your backup drive(s) to the computer? As an external, removable drive in a case with a USB/Firewire/eSATA port? A bare drive with a plug-on adapter? Another drive installed in the computer itself (I'd put a RAID setup in this category)? Is your backup drive always connected and always powered up, perhaps with a timed automatic backup? Or do you have to connect the drive to the computer (or network if you're set up that way) in order to copy data to it?

 

For my general backup, I make a clone of the computer's drive once every couple of months. I have two computers that I try to keep current copies of writing projects that I'm working on, as well as the finished version. Same for things that get updated now and then like business spreadsheets. I still do most of my multitrack recording on my Mackie hard disk recorder, so I usually work off the internal hard drive and keep a backup copy on an external drive in a carrier. I prefer one backup drive to a project, though I'll often have multiple projects on the internal drive, I don't like putting all my eggs in one basket.

[MrKnobs]

 

For my general backup, I make a clone of the computer's drive once every couple of months. I have two computers that I try to keep current copies of writing projects that I'm working on, as well as the finished version. Same for things that get updated now and then like business spreadsheets. I still do most of my multitrack recording on my Mackie hard disk recorder, so I usually work off the internal hard drive and keep a backup copy on an external drive in a carrier. I prefer one backup drive to a project, though I'll often have multiple projects on the internal drive, I don't like putting all my eggs in one basket.

 

 

Exactly this, except I use a Tascam MX2424 for my hard disk recorder. I have two HDs in the recorder. One is always a mirror of the other, which has saved my bacon quite a few times as the failure mode for this machine seems to be the hard drive either suddenly grabbing all the SCSI addresses (and thus colliding with the other) or the drive FAT getting scrambled. In either case, it's a simple matter to connect the offending drive to my tower PC and download the files.

 

I backup the MX to my tower computer via Ethernet each night.

 

On the tower computer I use the same strategy. Two internal hard drives, the C drive backed up to the other constantly. Every couple of weeks I backup the data to an external USB drive and every few months I clone the system drive and replace it with the clone. That way I always have a fresh hard drive AND a clone so I could just plug the stored clone in and not have to mess with reinstalling Windows and all my apps.

 

This may all sound complex and slow, but it's mostly automated and pretty fast to do.

 

Terry D.

[MikeRivers]

 

This may all sound complex and slow, but it's mostly automated and pretty fast to do.

 

 

Coming up with a system, whether completely automated, partially automated, or manually with not too many steps before you can let the drives just run on their own some time when you don't need the computer, seems to be the key to keeping up with backing up. People complain about this and that being slow and inefficient, but I don't care. I start a backup and then go to bed or to do grocery shopping, or watch a movie. I'm not at my computer 24 hours a day, though some days it seems like it.