Topic: archiving your recordings?

[manida]

so, in addition to an external harddrive, does anyone back up their files to DVD-R?  Seems like the safest alternative to a potential hardrive(s) crash.

[F.O.Bean]

I backup 4 DVDs or every set I record!

1: wav 24 uncut recording
2: flac 24 uncut recording
3: flac24 tracked DVDs
4: flac16 tracked dvdr

[manida]

I do all of my recording in 24 wav.  What would be the benefit of backing up in those other 3 formats? 

I mean, I can always go back and do editing/tracking to the original uncut 24 wav and save it how I want.

[to_taper]

I burn flacs of the original unedited wav, the individual tracks, a text file, any photos and artwork to a DVD-R.

[F.O.Bean]

I do all of my recording in 24 wav.  What would be the benefit of backing up in those other 3 formats? 

I mean, I can always go back and do editing/tracking to the original uncut 24 wav and save it how I want.

So I NEVER have to go back and reedit shit. Once it's burned onto DVDs it's done FOREVER

[Fatah Ruark (aka MIKE B)]

My Live Recording live on TWO IDENTICAL Hard Drives inside my desktop. On EACH drive I have my Masters as well as all of the tracked copies. The drives are cloned each time I add data to the drive. These 2 drives prevent a hard drive crash from killing my recordings. Unless both die at once...which isn't likely.

On the off chance that both drives do die at once (maybe due to a plane crashing into my house for example), I also make a copy of one of those drives to an external drive of the same size that I keep OFF-SITE. As of now I'm keeping it at my brothers house about 15 miles away. Ideally I'd keep it farther away, but I've come to the conclusion that if something so bad happens that both of our houses are destroyed (maybe a comet hits the Front Range) that I am unlikely to be worried about my recordings.

3 copies. 1 off site. Pretty basic backup strategy.

I don't trust DVD's. Too hard to check to see if they are still working. Can't hurt I guess to have them, but certainly don't depend on them. When your OS starts complaining about a hard drive buy a new one ASAP. Going through that right now.

[F.O.Bean]

I also have an internal and an external he'd that has all 11,000 mp3s I have

[Fatah Ruark (aka MIKE B)]

Another good option is to back up your tracked recordings in MP3 format to Google Music. 20,000 free tracks. Obviously MP3 isn't going to be the most desirable format, but you can also stream your music wherever you have an internet connection.

Haven't done that with my live recordings but most of my studio collection is up there (at least the stuff I really care about).

[Chuck]

I recently bought a dedicated 2TB drive to back-up my media server. I just use a clone program to clone the server content onto the back-up drive when I add more files to the server. I also make DVD-R's of the FLACS and photos for each show. I do like the idea of uploading to Google Music. I may start doing that soon. It's free?

[Marshall7]

I burn the raw 24 bit (FLAC'd) and the edited and tracked 24 and 16 bit versions (also FLAC'd) to DVD, and save the raw file to an external.

[edtyre]

I do hard drives.....(3) copies, two at my house connected to each of my two computers and
a third at my daughters house (we also have all my families archives this way....videos and pictures going back to 1889)

I don't trust DVDR's. I bought Mitsui Gold's starting ten years ago because they claimed to be 100 year archival quality.
Tens years in, some of them don't mount (glad i always made two copies) I still keep them but have transferred the contents to the hard
drives. I don't waste my time with tracked versions, i only archive the raw recordings. Its nothing to take a raw recording and re-do it.

Three times in 5 years i had to switch out one of the drives, these wear out. Beware having only one copy of your files.
Also i upload about 80% of what i record, so there's alway a copy somewhere in circulation, that is probably the best way to
insure it will be around in the future.

[adrianf74]

Call me paranoid but I have THREE DIFFERENT copies of all my masters from 2002 forward on SEPARATE HARD DRIVES.   One portable is at home, a second is a desktop drive and a third drive is stored off site and updated every two or three shows.    I can't trust even the best DVD-R material to not flake out on me after five years.

[DSatz]

The problem with using hard drives for this purpose--apart from their individual failure rate and somewhat limited service life--is that hard disk interfaces change with the times. Does anyone remember ESDI? My first large hard drive in the early 1990s (a full-height 700 MB Maxtor, costing well over $2000 in today's dollars) used that technology. If that drive still existed, I don't think I could find any way to connect it up now, some 20 years later. My UltraStor (company long out of business) ESDI controller fit only a VLB slot--an expansion card standard for i486 computers, which was quickly abandoned when the Pentium processor was released.

I'm still using Windows XP with a PATA (EIDE) drive as my C: drive. I'm currently looking to build a new Core i5-based PC to run Windows 7, but I notice that a growing number of motherboards in that class don't have on-board support for PATA or floppy drives any more. Hmmm.

Some day the present-day SATA interface will be similarly obsolete. At that point, I suppose the thing to do would be copy all your old hard drives onto whatever seems headed for greatness at that point. But I have reasonable confidence in being able to play back a DVD-R ~20 years from now, at least the single-layer kind. I've had mixed results with dual-layer DVD-Rs.

[F.O.Bean]

Good point dastardly, that's why I use HQ Verbatim DVDRs. They are suppose to have a VERY LONG archival life

[yousef]

I wouldn't trust cd/dvd/bluray media for archival purposes.

I keep the raw files, any project/montage files and the final mastered fileset as 16bit FLACs

I use two hard drives (and am planning to keep a third at my parents' place). As each drive reaches two-to-three years old it gets retired and replaced - it means I've got lots of hard drives stored away but I know that I've always got two copies of everything on drives that are well within their natural life.

Once I get some off-site backup sorted I'll be pretty content with my setup.