Just curious, how are you guys archiving your many gigs worth of vst libraries/instruments?

[Christian Jones]

My Windows/apps drive is 500gb and lately it's down to around 20gb. All my audio files and libraries are on their own drives, but then I remembered all the instruments/libraries I've downloaded and the zips are still on the Windows drive. Just wondering how everyone goes about archiving them. I assume you don't delete them and rely on the vender to provide you with them again if need be, as venders go out of business and products just stop being available. Like Bapu, how do you archive all that stuff - many large drives? I see no other way other than just backing them up to a drive somewhere but thought I'd ask in case there's anything special I could/should be doing.. 

[Amicus717]

I have a spare PC that I built as a dedicated NAS server (using NAS4Free), and dropped a couple of 4 TB drives in it. I store all my archives on there. I also have a 4TB USB3 backup drive from Seagate that I put extra copies of my really essential stuff -- archives that I need to pay to access (from IK Multimedia, for example), and project backups, etc.

[Bapu]

8TB NAS (effectively 4TB of storage).  1.37TB still free.

[slartabartfast]

External hard drives. There is no need for anything fast either to read or write an archived file as you can run backups and copies while you sleep. Generally less expensive than a NAS, and easier to move to a safe place.

[Christian Jones]

Lol yeah dumb question now that I think of it.. I mean *obviously* you back the stuff up somewhere, I need to stop over-thinking everything. I *was* curious though how many hard drives bapu had 

[paulo]

4 hours ago, Christian Jones said:

I *was* curious though how many hard drives bapu had 

Bapu is a hard drive. You never heard anyone say " That Bapu is unreal" ? 

In reality what we know all think of as Bapu is an early version of AI, codenamed Am (Artificial mediocrity).

 

[Bapu]

9 hours ago, Christian Jones said:

 I *was* curious though how many hard drives bapu had 

Eleventy four

[SteveStrummerUK]

Play nice you two ?

[abacab]

17 hours ago, Christian Jones said:

My Windows/apps drive is 500gb and lately it's down to around 20gb. All my audio files and libraries are on their own drives, but then I remembered all the instruments/libraries I've downloaded and the zips are still on the Windows drive. Just wondering how everyone goes about archiving them. I assume you don't delete them and rely on the vender to provide you with them again if need be, as venders go out of business and products just stop being available. Like Bapu, how do you archive all that stuff - many large drives? I see no other way other than just backing them up to a drive somewhere but thought I'd ask in case there's anything special I could/should be doing.. 

I would definitely get them off the system drive.

I make sure that everything that I download goes into the "Downloads" folder on my system drive, where it then gets extracted to run any installers, etc. My system drive is SSD, so it does these tasks very quickly. But it does require  a bit of housekeeping.

Mostly I just move the downloaded files into my archives on an external drive. Also make sure to delete any newly unzipped install folders in the "Downloads" folder, as they are redundant, and can be recreated from the main zip files.

[razor7music]

My day job is at a data storage provider. My drives could fail 5X over before I'll run out of space!! (which is both cool and scary at the same time!)