Studio data backup and anti-disaster procedures

[jeak]

Just curious. What are your studio's methods for backing up in-progress recordings and protecting them against disaster?

A backup HD in another building? A portable HD you keep in your briefcase or coat pocket at all times? You know, in case the studio burns down.

The digital age makes this easier, but what did studios do in the all-analog days? What if the building had exploded halfway through "Aja" or "Dark Side of the Moon"? Are there any horror stories of might-have-been classics that never saw the light of day because of catastrophe?

Not to be gloomy or anything. Just wondering what backup measures you take.

[Rick Sutton]

Step one: extra drive in the computer that has all current work backed up. Incremental backup added as each song is "closed" on main drive. All session files incremented (save as) and not overwritten.

Step two: at the end of each day all new work backed up on 40 gig pocket drive to be taken home and added to bulk backup on multiple hard drive stack.
Never overwrite anything/always arrange files by date so you are adding to existing back up.

[daryllh]

As an added question:

How do you commercial studio owners deal with this topic?

Do you suggest or 'make' the artist buy a drive before the session? Do you have it written out that the studio 'is not responsible for loss of data...blah blah'?

One of the studios I work at has a pretty good system and track record for backups. At the end of the session, a backup of the session is saved on another drive (marked backup). Granted, this drive is kept in the same building, but we always stress to the client to purchase their own drive. If the client wants to keep it in their possession, it's their choice. More often than not, they keep it at the studio.

There are better ways to do it, I know. However, I personally have not lost a session.

Take that back, I have lost a completed session (as a freelancer). However, the client was told to supply a backup and never did. I saved it to my personal hard drive which petered out. Fortunately, he did have a master of the completed album. It's my 1 black mark in the data storage part of my career. (never 'overwrote' a session by mistake...knock on veneer)

[jeak]

Originally Posted by Rick Sutton

Never overwrite anything/always arrange files by date so you are adding to existing back up.

Thanks for all the info, Rick. Sorry if this is a dumb question, but why "never overwrite"? Does overwriting make the data more vulnerable to corruption? Or is this so you always have a record of everything that's been done? Or both?

I'm just a small-time home recordist doing my own stuff. I use a consumer all-in-one DAW (Korg D3200) with a 40GB drive. If I never overwrote anything, I'd run out of room pretty fast. If I record a take that sucks, I erase it forever and try again (undo and/or overwrite).

[Rick Sutton]

Originally Posted by jeak

why "never overwrite"?

Not a dumb question at all. Actually I overwrite bad takes as a regular rule.

BUT>>>in the context of backups...... I never overwrite a backup, I only add to it..Of course I'm only backing up good takes, bad takes are vaporized around here just like at your place.
Never overwriting a backup is to help eliminate the "big goof" the dreaded "Which was the version that we were keeping.....Oh shit! I just dragged the wrong file over the master backup". AND......sometimes it's days or weeks later when you discover this disaster....but it only takes a heartbeat for it to happen. I've seen a couple of instances of the "big goof" that were VERY expensive to fix.

The tendancy is to drag the entire file over the old one and let it replace everything with the new version. This is easier on the operator as you do not have to keep track of things as you do in an incremental backup. Once you get used to sorting by date and doing incremental BU's you find it to be efficient and safer than overwriting. Many use special programs to do this automatically. I am used to doing it manually.

[kittonian]

I have a GT-103 with 3 GT-Key removable firewire drives specifically for this purpose. If I'm doing a full album I use a new GT-Key and backup all the final files, sessions, etc. and then put it in a remote place for safe keeping. For general sessions I backup and archive until the drive is full and then pop in a new GT-Key.

[numrologst]

i back everything up usually once a week... Sometimes every 2 days... But I will keep all the back ups until the album/project is finished... At that point, i delete everything but the final back up...

It's good to keep the final back up on a raid setup with redundancy... Then burn a dvd with the session files, and then keep them on an external drive... I usually use 250gb wd drives...(I get them free)

The dvd backup should go in a fire safe, and soon as an external drive is full, it should also go in the fire safe...

I always back up tapes to digital too just in case of fire... The tapes will be gone, but you still got a digital back up of the tape in the fire safe

[digitalson]

well...first the projects data gets backed up to a mirror drive after each session and weekly to a dlt tape drive
then a server computer does weekly images on all the os drives
...then that server also does virus scans every other day
the studio has 7 pc's running so thats lots of backups...

[Wilburguy]

Within 5 min of the end of a session we begin a Retrospect incremental backup to Sony AIT2, to 2 different tapes. Every project gets an A and B set of backup tapes. At the end of the day one copy stays at the studio and one copy goes home with us.

[The Byre]

At the end of the day, everything gets exported as B-WAVs to a second harddisk. At the end of the project, all files are exported to three sets of DVD-Rs. We keep two and the customer gets one.

[DCtoDaylight]

I do mostly my own stuff, so I don't generate as many gigabytes as full-band situations.

On my hard disk, I do incremental saves, as others have described. Then I dump the current version to CD or DVD every time I make a significant advance.

One handy thing, that I learned at my day job, is to follow a file naming convention with a date code at the end - something like:

SongName_v1_070210

Where SongName is the name of the song, v1 means version 1 (I increment this number whenever I make a significant change - like adding a new instrument, changing the arrangement, doing a new mix, etc.). And 070210 means 2007-February-10.

This way, you know immediately the relative maturity of every file, and also have an automatic reminder of how long its been since you've made a new incremental backup. It also means that the machine sorts the files in chronological order, even when it's sorting alphabetically.

I was skeptical when my company announced that everyone had to start following this scheme for naming files, but it really is helpful for workflow.