What is your favoruite way of backing up project? Saving per-project, as bundles or something else?

[Wojtek Stecyszyn]

Hi everyone.

Please share you way of making  backup of your precious CbB projects.

I heard that saving as bundles often result in corruption. I dont know if I want to take that risk...

 

And what next?

External drive? Online backup service?  Or maybe burning DVD and fill up the attic  ?

What is your favourite way?

 

Edited October 14, 2021 by Wojtek Stecyszyn

[martsave martin s]

i do back-up copying the projects on a USB-drive

[John Vere]

I drag and drop my entire folders which may contain 10 to 25  projects into  backup drives both internal and external. I date them as such. 
“ Originals October 2021 backup “. 

Those are albums I’m working on for myself or clients. I also copy those to my second computer. 
There is a minimum of 4 copies available and often many more dates. Storage is cheap . 

My favourite method is for my backing tracks which I have slowly eliminated all audio tracks by converting them to midi. 
Those I save to one drive as CWP files. I have over 200 of them but if there’s no audio the files are small. 
They are then stored in multi locations at once. I also saved them as midi files.
Midi is future proof and definitely what I have spent the majority of my time on. So I think everyone should save their projects as midi if they contain a lot of midi tracks 

Edited October 12, 2021 by John Vere

[lapasoa]

External drive. You'll never be wrong.

[Craig Anderton]

I back up per-project files on Blu-Ray discs. 25 GB discs are about a dollar each, and a recordable drive is about $100. Blu-Ray is a far more robust backup medium than DVDs. Then there's a second copy on a backup hard drive that gets refreshed every few months.

There's nothing about the bundle format itself that's a problem, the problem is that it's like a zip file - if there's some kind of corruption in the storage media, you probably won't be able to access the project. The nature of that kind of backup is you come back to it years later, and who knows what might have happened to the media. With individual files,  maybe corruption will nuke a vocal clip or something, but you should still be able to access more of what you need.

[wetdentist]

i have had problems with bundles in the past (like, more than 10 yrs ago in the past) but they were bad enough problems for me (corrupt .bun files) to decide to never use bundle files ever again.  external hard drives with project folders has been good for me

[Michael McBroom]

In the short term, I just use CW's default, where it creates a new directory for each new project. Eventually, after I've gotten several projects done, I'll export them to an external drive, or in these days of the ever-increasing capacity of USB jump drives, I'm thinking about backing up to them instead. Any backup drive that involves spinning platters has a fatal expiration date, so I'd just as soon not have my music saved to spinning platters. However, since the price of SSDs has come down so much, I'm thinking that I should just use one of these instead -- assuming they're of archival permanence, and I don't know the answer to that question, whether it be a USB drive or an SSD. Even CDs and DVDs have expirations -- you gotta go with the expensive gold ones if you want archival permanence.

As for bundles, I have several I created with Pro Audio 9 (Sonar's predecessor)  over 20 years ago and unarchived them about a year ago into CWbB. They unarc'd fine, no problems.

 

Edited October 14, 2021 by Michael McBroom

[Jerry Gerber]

I don't use the bundle feature.  I back up the .cwp file in 3 places: on a second internal hard drive, on a flash drive and uploaded to my server.  I backup all audio for a project to another internal hard drive, to a DVD that goes into a safety deposit box offsite and to a flash drive.  When I finish an entire album, I make at least 2 masters and one goes into the offsite safety deposit box.

Offsite backup is always a good idea in case of fire, flood earthquake, nuclear war, alien invasion or asteroid strike.  😁

Studies have revealed that most accidents occur within 2 miles from home, so it's also a good idea to move every year or two 😜

Edited October 16, 2021 by jsg

[Gswitz]

I 7z the folders then drop them on cheap USB drives and leave a copy at a relatives house. I swap it out when I visit. This is enormously inexpensive.

[John Vere]

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