You have heard me bang on about backup strategies, well I am not alone. Community member Neils Stummeyer from Petershagen in Germany has taken the trouble to outline his backup strategy.
I have just read the last post about backups and want to share with you my backup system that has worked without a problem for me very well for the last half year. I work daily in my studio on a Mac Pro with Lion and Mountain Lion.
Backups in 3 places.
- The first is the Mac OS Time Machine on a second hard drive inside my Mac Pro set with a manual start because of some Pro Tools problems with the auto backup of Time Machine.
- The second one is online via Gobbler… you all know that, Gobbler is awesome.
- The third one is my favourite because it works automatically and it is saved to other room outside my studio. I bought an NAS Synology 213+ with 2x 3TB Hard Drives (RAID 1). With the application SYNK I can back up all drives and/or folders that I like via the network / ethernet cable.
For me it is the Pro Tools plug-ins folders, my whole audio drive and my samples folder. You can select that the Synk app stops working/syncing while Pro Tools is running. If you close one session the back up starts automatically.
What I really like is the option to mirror your chosen folders. If I delete a file or folder, for example - get rid of some old unused audio files inside of Pro Tools, it also clears that data on my back up drives. With the right setting on my NAS I can also access any session i need from any location that has internet access.
I believe that Synk works well with other NAS solutions and usb/firewire/thunderbolt drives. Also it works from Snow Leopard up to Mavericks.
Sure, you have to make an investment (for me it was about 650 Euro for the NAS with drives and 45 Euro for the Snyk (pro) app but for a back up system, where every time in your hand and over your own network is worth every cent. I also use this NAS also as a private cloud and up- and download place for my clients.
Mike says - Your system is very similar to mine, I use Gobbler as my private cloud to send content to clients and to share projects. It too gives me access to my sessions stored in the cloud, but your system is not as expensive in cloud storage fees. However if your building was damaged or burnt down you would loose both your studio drives and your NAS.
For more on backups, take a look at my article on backup options and remember if you buy a G-Tech drive you get 50Gb of space on Gobbler free for one year.