My original plan was to continue on my series of music studio equipment series, however something major happen today which stopped me in my tracks. Something that to me very well could be career altering.

I had just got back from Minneapolis visiting family and friends for the Holidays and went to back up a recent session I did and the power went out in the middle of back up my data. When power returned a short time later ALL OF MY FILES WERE GONE! 3 years of session work including current clients work that in total was over 300 gigs.

Lucky for me I learned early that “if your files are not backed up in 3 places including one place offsite it is not backed up”. That and ” it is not if, it is a matter of when a hard drive will fail and you will lose all of your files”.

So instead of going into more home studio equipment and setting up your home studio I am going to outline my file back up strategy that way you will never have to worry again. I see it all the time on my Facebook and Twitter that someone had their hard drive die or a computer crashed or got stolen. While that is never fun it is not an excuse to as why you lost your data. Your clients may empathize with you however they want their data.

The file back up software I use in my workflow

My workflow looks like this II have a working drive this is a drive that all my current and past sessions are on. It is the drive that I do my recording on. Nightly at about 3am I have that hard drive backed up automatically to my “Session Back Up drive” which is a separate hard drive I use a program called carbon copy cloner to automate this process. I also have a separate automation rule that will back up all my documents that are on my main computer hard drive that backs up to my Session Backup drive.

With my documents I also use Dropbox and Google drive in conjunction with MacDropAny which allows me to select any folder(s) to back up to both of these services as soon as something changes. This proved to be very useful when going to school as I would work on a paper at home and forget to move it to my Macbook. All I had to do is pull it from my drop box and I had it even if I forgot it at home.

For a long time this is all I had and in 90% of situations this is fine. Then I started thinking of worst case situations. What if a fire destroyed my apartment or what if someone broke in and stole both of my hard drives? Or like today what if the power goes out and my data just disappears? If any of these happen I would be screwed 3 years of data gone!

Lucky for me about 3 months ago I ran across a Lifehacker article covering a service called crash plan. I knew that it was unlikely that I could back up 300 gigs of data to the cloud easier. However I couldn’t think of a better way to do it. So I decided to figure out how I could back up my data off site.

What my workflow looked like prior to Crash Plan

Here is my new workflow with Crash Plan

As you can see not much changed I only really added Crash Plan into the equation and then I had 3 copies including a copy offsite / in the cloud. If I was doing more work or had more data to back up I would then look at backing up a 3rd hard drive and keeping it off site and then switching it out ever 7-14 days for the back up drive I had on site. This would prevent me from loosing more than 7-14 days of work.

How I setup Crash Plan so I did not exceed my data limit

In most situations you are not likely to go over your data limit in a month, even with streaming Netflix, playing Xbox and browsing the web I was using at tops 50-75 gigs per month. That left me about 250 gigs left over for the month to use. With only 300 gigs to back up it was pretty easy to accomplish this task

At the time I was not doing a lot of recording so I made sure the most recent copies of my sessions where backed up before starting . I planned to do this 2-3x a year at most as it would be a long process. Hopefully I never had to download all of this but it was there just incase I had to.Once this was done I set Crashplan to automatically back up my data when I knew I was not going to be home and it would not interfere with the home network which was mainly at night. I did not go over my data cap and everything was saved.

Hard drives I am using and plan to get in the future.

Currently I am using 2 Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Home 2 TB STAM2000100. Which I was in school I was told that Segate’s tend to last longer and fail less. Being the good student that I am I listened so far 3 years later no issues minus this last power issue. Overall I like this drive and has served me well as a working drive and back up drive. The drives I plan to move to are G-Technology G-DRIVE Q 2TB External Hard Drive w/ eSATA, USB 2.0, Firewire 400, Firewire 800 Interfaces 0G00203. They are more expensive than a normal drive however they have an amazing reputation in professional recording, video, and photo industries of simply working with out failure and come with a 3 year warranty if anything happens to them. I also know a few people who have these types of drives and love them.

‘ll leave you with one last thing check this video on Chase Jarvis’s Work Flow in regards to data back up. every time I watch this I want to go buy another harddrive.In cause you forget GO BACK UP YOUR DATA NOW!

Till next time

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