#4

I’ve also had good experiences with Synology. I also subscribe to the Dropbox 1tb plan and keep an extra copy of anything important there.

#5

I can echo all of the advice so far. Dropbox 1tb for current working stuff that I need with me, Synology NAS (4 disks) at home for long term storage and backup. I add to the Backblaze for offsite backup of my laptop… and I should probably have some sort of offsite backup of my NAS too, just in case…

#6

Thanks for the comments!

I just bought a synology, but I’m not entirely sure how I should set it up. My initial thought was to use it as a time machine backup, and keep my samples and work on an external harddrive that will also be backed up to the synology. But I’m wondering if I should put all those on the synology and then plug an external drive into it to backup that.

I suppose part of the question is, how quick is it to access samples stored on the nas…

#7

A quick google search confirms that latency on a regular NAS makes use for samples impractical…

#8

Yeah. I keep all my working files local for speed and ease of access while away form home. NAS is for backup, long term storage, and media libraries.

#9

Weird, I do the same thing: Dropbox 1TB for current stuff, and Synology for the vast backlog.

#10

yeah NAS is good for mass storage and backup. i keep a huge library of sound FX on it for my film stuff, and pull files as needed. but when i’m editing it all goes on a usb 3 ssd.

#11

My approach used to be a Dropbox kind of setup but I ended up getting bogged down with syncing so took the lesser (to me) evil of using an external hdd just for music, which travels with me between locations. I mainly keep project storage and libraries on there but individual machines have their own vst setups and libraries so if I forget the drive I can still get something down. I use backblaze on my desktop which makes an incremental backup whenever the drive is plugged in. Apart from eating up a USB port it’s working well so far.

#12

digital data has to exist in at least two places at once, or it doesn’t really exist
:slightly_smiling_face:

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pro tip from twenty years ago…
'a master and two back-ups

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#13

I have a Time Machine backup of my laptop drive, and a couple of other drives with photography work, music sketches, and part of my music collection. I’d like some way of backing up all of this, but not sure what would be best. Someone suggested a NAS drive to me before, but that seems like overkill in some ways (also £££). What do you use?

#14

daily or so: a simple 1To usb hd that stays in a bookshelf at home. I carry my laptop so this is really to preveny any unfortunate loss of the unit or failure of the ssd.

monthly: i sync that usb disc to another one. then one of the discs moves with me to the office and gets synced to a NAS. This NAS also has a periodical automatic “offsite” backup (another NAS in a technical room across the street).

I also have lots of “old” and badly duplicated data on various hdds, dvds, flash drives, so it’s still a mess :smiley:

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#15

The dropbox 1TB plan is my main live backup; with occasional superduper clones of my hard drive which I could plug in and run in the event of a lost laptop or catastrophic ssd failure.

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#16

I don’t. 20 chars of YOLO!

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#17

I use a cloud service (Backblaze) for backups. Currently I have about 6TB backed up. The initial backup obviously takes a while depending on the size of your hard drives (it was about half a year for me :smiley: ), but after that, it just constantly backs up new things and changes in the background and everything’s always stored remotely. In case of data loss, you can either download it or pay them to ship you a hard drive with all your data on it.

This solution also has the advantage of having access to all your files where ever you go, as you can access them through a web interface. Sharing links to specific files is also possible. I’m very happy with the solution. There’s a monthly payment connected with it, but I wouldn’t be paying much less if i was just buying external hard drives from time to time and that wouldn’t have the additional benefits.

1 Like
#18

I have 2 identical Toshiba Hds (2 TB) in separate HD caddies. I use a software called Carbon Copy Cloner. You can configure the software to copy in various ways but I use it in a simple way. 1 HD is my working drive the other is a clone. As soon as I plug in the clone the software recognises it, scans for new/updated files and copies them to the clone. When these drives are full I will put 2 new drives in the caddies.

#19

NAS drives aren’t really a valid backup plan - they’re more like a networked version of the other external drives you currently have. However, because they’re always-on-tiny-servers, they enable a few other useful things, notably, backing themselves up to cloud storage.

So, having just overhauled my own backup strategy, I can share:

  • I have Dropbox but I mainly use it for collaboration rather than storage.
  • I have a Time Machine clone of my laptop that gets done about… once a week. Not quite bootable, but good enough.
  • I have Arq running backups of everything in my home folder but iTunes off that machine to Backblaze B2 storage, fairly all-the-time. So that’s offsite versions of key things.
  • I also have a 1TB usb drive that, like you, I don’t backup yet. It’s about ten years old and this just feels like a massive liability for all my offloaded photographs, and probably offloaded music stuff too. So my plan is to replace that with a big NAS with a pair of disks mirroring each other (RAID1). RAID is not backup, but it’s a guard against mechanical failure. And then I’m going to let the NAS software also back that up to Backblaze B2.

Coupled with: a lot of my life is online (GMail) or code (Github) and can be recovered somehow via those means.

That covers multiple locations and strategies for all my key stuff, and I think that’s a good start. (Of course, Gary Bernhardt would point out at this point that if you haven’t tried to restore from one of your backups, it can’t really be counted as backup, but I’m a trusting sort).

2 Likes
#20

TimeMachine backups for my laptops, iMac and USB/Firewire drives. TM has saved my ass several times over the past several years but I would still like some kind of online backup solution.

#21

I don’t.

The last few years have been a struggle for me to shed my tendency to hoard things - both physical (eurorack modules, records, books, …) and digital.

For digital stuff, that means that I have a Dropbox with the stuff that absolutely matters, which has to be <1 TB (max Dropbox size). Of course, when I am working on a project, I might have much more than 1TB of files - but once the project reaches its end, I delete pretty much everything except for the deliverables/documentation of the project.

A nice side effect of that is that all my digital devices could burst into flames right now - all I have to do is go to the Apple store, buy a new MacBook, install Dropbox and i’m ready to go. That’s been a nice peace of mind of its own.

Does that mean there are times where I find myself wishing I had some source code or source video from years ago? Sure. Do I believe that these small, rare frustrations are worth not having to worry about backing up everything, worrying about a RAID server, etc? Certainly. And not having a file from 5 years ago has never been a show stopper (besides, when I used to archive everything obsessively, there was still the frustration that many years later the software was incompatible with the data files, and then you’re trying to archive systems rather than data which is its own maddening process…)

Nothing is permanent, and trying to fight that is just too much stress and overhead for me.

2 Likes
#22

important discussion :slightly_smiling_face:
digital data has to exist
in more than one location
or it doesn’t really exist

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pro tip:
'a master and two back-ups

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#23

I have a daily-to-weekly on-site backup routine (using Time Machine).

Every four months (end of term) I also back up to an offsite copy - stays at the office for home machines, stays at home for office machines.

Every year I do a careful ‘stuff that really matters’ archive, manually, to another offsite in case of systematic corruption e.g. by Time Machine.

Am I paranoid? Probably not enough. I’ve had complete system fails before. Both my work and many of my hobbies are on my machines, so…

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