Session backup strategies & workflows

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Session backup strategies & workflows

w/ Andrew Scheps

20 min • 2017

German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese

If you've worked with computers before, odds are you've experienced the unfortunate truth that hard drives will eventually fail, files will be easily lost and disks will be mysteriously misplaced. Having a solid data backup system with multiple redundancies is the only way to guarantee your projects will never go astray.

Grammy winners Fab Dupont and Andrew Scheps discuss their strategies and technologies to automate their backups and ensure that they never lose a file and can easily access their sessions from anywhere in the world.

Learn about techniques and the healthy paranoia producers and engineers need to have in order to never lose a client project again.

Use the advanced workflows Andrew and Fab have developed as inspiration to take a look at your own data management strategies and come up with a system that works for you.

4.9

35 reviews

superks • Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Yes! Having a backup philosophy is important. This topic cannot be something we professionals compromise in. I'm not sure why RAID wasn't mentioned, but it's worth everybody's time to consider a RAID solution to hard local backups

djdrew • Wednesday, May 19, 2021

These type of topics can be the most important when doing music professionally. Appreciate this video, and plan to look into transporter and Amazon both seem very powerful to me. Thanks again Andrew and Fab

luigi de • Wednesday, September 9, 2020

Great video but one thing is not clarified .. ok to backup for projects you are working on, but once they are completed how long do you keep them in backups? Many thanks

completeFic • Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Love this kind of insight - there's a million demonstrations on EQ and compression, but very little on the nitty gritty realities of data management and workflow, so thank you guys!! I know I'm a couple years late here, but I have one question (for anyone who has experience with it): is there any reason not to use the same hard drive for a bootable backup, as well as a local backup for working files (provided you still have your data in three different places)? I have an external drive that I use as a local backup - just wondering if the bootable drive needs to be separate from that?

kulturfolger • Wednesday, January 22, 2020

I totally agree to the way Andrew Scheps describes his process. The way he copies the data multiple times it’s pretty robust and fail safe with multiple copies. But on the other hand the way Fab handles his data is just syncing data between devices while only Dropbox maintains all of his data on their hard discs. A sync is no backup. Having every file constantly on access on every device may lead to silent data corruptions is happing. Like any of his devices could replacing old files with defective files (as an example) without him ever noticing.

Soundlight • Thursday, January 9, 2020

Thank you

nersonangelo • Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Nice reminders and ideas.. by the way what's that somewhat exotic phrase Fab keeps on saying in the end..?

sherrylynnlee • Saturday, January 4, 2020

I have 3 backups: - External hard drive via time machine so I can go back to a particular point in time e.g if a an update screwed things up. - Dropbox - real-time sync on multiple devices for easy collaboration + portability - BackBlaze - backs up all my computers and can restore files from any of those computers anywhere, any time. They'll even ship me a hard drive if requested. Like Fab, I prefer to leave the human out of the equation and opt for set and forget systems :)

Venetian • Wednesday, August 21, 2019

For the automatic dropbox uploading, the command would be: ./dropbox_uploader.sh upload /Volumes/Backup/ProTools/MyProtoolsFolder/* MyProtoolsFolder and this uses https://github.com/andreafabrizi/Dropbox-Uploader You have to do a funny "create app" thing on dropbox.com, and paste in an API key to get this script to run, but once it's going it works well.

natalyt96 • Friday, September 21, 2018

It is really interesting in the way you are searching different clouds or new forms for maintaining you information safe. I don't know but it is quite interesting if you recommend HDD too, I mean, Fab doesn't like it but maybe you can share us information about it. I think if you have your computer, a cloud and a HDD is the basics. Yeah.

deguello • Sunday, June 10, 2018

Check out Crashplan, unlimited data, runs anywhere from every 10 minutes to every 24 hours. Keeps deleted files forever, 256-bit AES encryption. Very easy to setup. You can do a 30 day trial to see if it works for you. I just started using it and haven’t noticed any lag time on my system. Good option if you don’t want or know how to setup scripts. Hope this helps. $10 a month per device.

NeilGrahamIvesMusic • Thursday, May 24, 2018

Andrew and Fab, What brand of Hard Drives do you both use? Are there any particular brands and models you have found reliable over the years? Thank you, Neil.

bgrichting • Wednesday, January 10, 2018

AFAIK Transporter has ended support for their products in September 2017, according to their website: http://helper.nexsansupport.com/tfc_support Have one myself but now thinking about some other solution.

melissa.f • Friday, December 29, 2017

This is great, but don't forget about those of us who are just starting out! We don't necessarily understand things like "scripts" and "incrementals." Just an extra sentence defining these things would be incredibly helpful.

valderval.o • Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Great video!!! I use time machine (4tb ext) to backup both boot drive (500gb ssd int) and audio drive (2tb raid thunderbolt). When the project finish it goes to a ext hd named by year to die alone.