Prelude

Most of us have probably never had a hard drive crash or been bitten by a virus that deletes data so it's easy to not even think about backing up your data.

But let me tell you, that the first time it happens to you, you might see your entire career crash and burn. This is not a joke unless you don't care about the hard work you have put in already.

 

My Story

Now, I run this site and I back it up regularly. And for a long while I backed up my home computer as well. Then I bought a new computer and forgot to set it up with a backup program. Big mistake.

After buying a new 2TB drive and moving all my audio files onto it -  I'm talking gigs and gigs of samples, soundfonts, drum kits and all my project files - all seemed great until one night the external hard drive crashed. I don't know why. I don't have any viruses or spyware. It just up and died.  FWIW, it was a Maxtor One Touch and I will never buy one of these again.

Guess what? ... all the work I did since I moved the files to this new drive - about 5 months - is GONE.

5 friggin months of beats. Many of latest beats I will never get back like "Crab Shack" or my "CAPO Remix". Plus I had a ton of "idea" beats which are unfinished beats that are in early stages but had some potential.

Luckily, I kept the original drive from 5 months ago, so I could get that data back, but what if I had decided to format the old drive and use it for something else. I would have died... Well not really but it would have been 10 times worse of a feeling as I have now.

Plus, I'm still not fully able to make beats yet becauseI've been so caught up in trying to recover my lost data, I havent set up my FLStudio to use my old files and I need to re-install some VSTs. *sigh*

 

The Message

What I'm trying to say here, is don't be stupid. If you have anything worth keeping like your sample libraries and your project files and plug-in libraries, then back those mutha-uckers up!

What if you got some deal for a beat and then your drive dies? You lose out on a thousand dollar deal because you were too cheap to pay for a $50 program? Thats called being a sucka. And while I don't have any $1,000.00 deals going right now, I still feel like a sucka for neglecting my backups.

 

Really, is it worth $50 to make sure you have your stuff protected? Then do it. You might say, but I can't afford $50... to which I say, then your ish isn't worth $50 and thats a shame. There are free alternatives also, I prefer to get something I know is proven to work on production machines and doesn't take up a ton of my resources. My backup program of choice also does something called incremental backups, which means it's smart enough to only backup files that are new or have changed since the last backup.

 

Acronis

One of the reasons I failed to get my backup going on the new computer is because on the old computer I had set it and forgot it was running. I use a program called Acronis Home Backup on the old computer and it ran so great and in the background, I forgot all about it until it was too late and I needed a backup that wasn't there.

I have been using the "server" version of Acronis for years to backup this website every night.

Acronis can also do a complete system backup (operating system, registry, files) and recover your complete hard drive if you choose to set it up for that.

So please, if you take music production, beat making or whatever you want to call it, seriously, then make backups of some kind. I know it seems like a time-consuming thing, but it really isn't if you get a good backup software. You can set it and forget it.

Update:
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