Home Studio Tip of the Month
Back it up!Last weekend I did something really dumb. If you tried to visit the Revolution Audio site you may have noticed it wasn't working right, well that was my fault. I was trying to improve an admin feature without backing up the files correctly. When I tried to revert the changes, I made things worse. I had backed up the wrong files and really made a mess. Oops.
The same thing can happen with your recording projects. In the summer I had an artist coming to me for mixing. He had to cancel due to a faulty hard drive and lack of backups. He lost a good chunk of his album because he didn't have a good backup routine.
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| Backups go on a separate drive |
What is a good backup routine?
You NEED to get in the habit of making a copy of everything important.
How often is personal preference, I do weekly backups for my system and daily for important projects.
What you back up is also up to you. Some back up all the data on all their drives to a new location, I'm a little more specific. I back up my documents, photos, recording projects and a few other folders to an external firewire hard drive. Just what is important and irreplaceable.
Backup options
I use a program called Acronis True Image Home to do my backups. What I like about Acronis is it only updates the files that have changed since the last backup, which makes it much more efficient than the one built into Windows 7. It also doesn't complain if forget to turn my external drive on time for my backup, it just starts whenever it's available. The Win7 backup function required me to manually reset the backup settings, eventually it stopped working all together so I really can't recommend that one.
Mac users have the brilliant Time Machine backup utility included with OSX 10.5+. This works extremely well and if you need to dig into the backups it's easy to see each version of a file chronologically. I have Time Machine set to manual because it can interfere with recording, but I wouldn't recommend disabling it completely unless you have another backup scheme.
If it's irreplaceable - back it up!
