Backing Up Your Stuff

I have all of my song sheets in my cloud server. I just keep a couple of songs in local machines at a time.
 
Some of it is stored, and some of it is stored in multiple places, but I'm not a particularly organized person and I get my music from so many sources in so many platforms that it is scattered all over the place. I always think about getting it all gathered up in one place then backing it up, but that never seems to happen. I always have something else to do.
 
I'll never use paper again, I also don't trust the cloud for being accessible all the time, though I do use Dropbox to transfer files from my Mac to my iPad Pro, so I backup to 2 local drives. Scanning also makes very large file sizes, I make original PDFs that are very small.


This is Michael Kohan in Los Angeles, Beverly West near the Beverly Center
9 tenor cutaway ukes, 5 acoustic bass ukes, 11 solid body bass ukes, 9 mini electric bass guitars (Total: 34)

• Donate to The Ukulele Kids Club, they provide ukuleles to children in hospital music therapy programs. www.theukc.org
• Member The CC Strummers: YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/CCStrummers/video, Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheCCStrummers
 
I have several layers here.

1) "source code" - the raw musescore or chordpro text files that I work on to create the PDFs that I'll play from. These get stored on github as well as being backed up by my normal system backup processes (cloud sync, external hard drive on site and external hard drive off site).
2) Usable digital (PDFs & text files) - generated from "source code" or from photos/scans of photos, or downloaded from elsewhere. These get uploaded to my OneDrive and then copied down to various computers and iPads
3) Paper - I have a few binders of print-outs. Mostly these are pieces I've gotten elsewhere (classes, etc.) and are used as input for #1 or #2, notes from figuring out a song, or printouts from before I had a large iPad or if I'm going someplace I don't want to carry electronics. They tend to get crunched, disorganized, coffee stained, etc. and are definitely not archival. Notes are often written on whatever paper was at hand (advert
4) Books - see "paper", but less damaged. I tend to copy the pieces I'm actively working on to digital.
5) e-Books - depending on where I got them from and what format they're in. Kindle books are trapped in Kindle. Others have a separately backed up folder before being copied to Kindle, iBooks, or forScore
 
Good question, good thread. I have been thinking about this too. I have lots of charts that are in Dropbox, which is how I get the charts onto my iPad, so in that sense, I suppose they are backed up, unless Dropbox disappears. But I also do a lot of my own charts, where I write in certain chord formations on top of the melody lines, and I only have these charts on paper. I suppose I should scan them and either store them on a thumb drive or put them somewhere in a cloud (Dropbox, I guess).
 
Similar to Jerry41

My main PC has multiple hard drives one of which is named Store and this is where the My Docs folder is located. Everything such as images, music, pdf’s, word docs etc goes in here.

There is a seperate USB hard drive plugged in that has all the Backup files of the Op System and a copy of the Store drive.

The My Docs folder of the Store drive is also copied to two other seperate USB hard drives, I store one of these hard drives in my garage which is remote to our house.

I use FreeFileSync to copy all the folders and Paragon as the Op System backup.

FreeFileSync gives exact copies of the files rather than encrypted Backup files that some software does.
 
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I'll never use paper again, I also don't trust the cloud for being accessible all the time, though I do use Dropbox to transfer files from my Mac to my iPad Pro, so I backup to 2 local drives. Scanning also makes very large file sizes, I make original PDFs that are very small.


This is Michael Kohan in Los Angeles, Beverly West near the Beverly Center
9 tenor cutaway ukes, 5 acoustic bass ukes, 11 solid body bass ukes, 9 mini electric bass guitars (Total: 34)

• Donate to The Ukulele Kids Club, they provide ukuleles to children in hospital music therapy programs. www.theukc.org
• Member The CC Strummers: YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/CCStrummers/video, Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheCCStrummers

Every so often a cloud service goes belly-up.
 
Best practice for digital assets is to keep three backup copies: one local, one stored in a remote location and one in the cloud. This is not overkill if your computer holds important files -- work, manuscripts, financial records, five generations of family photos, that recipe for ginger cookies it took two years and the threat of bodily harm to pry from its secretive owner ... ok, maybe that's just me. (Those are good cookies.)

If the only files on your computer are ukulele tab, you might not care so much about backups. I still think it's a good idea to upload files to a cloud service and also keep a copy on an external hard drive. Why both? Because cloud companies go out of business and bad things can happen (God forbid) to the house where your computer, the NAS, and that binder of hard copies are all located.

The odds that Google Docs will go out of business on the same day your house burns down are very low. Unless it's an asteroid. Not much we can do about asteroids.

The only backup activity I do that is uniquely uke-related is every so often I make a MobileSheets library backup and save the resulting .msb file to Dropbox.

I suppose an excellent backup strategy would be to make a copy of all my songsheets and tabs (either digital or hard copy) and share it with my uke-playing friends. Yes, in fact, this is by far the best strategy :cool:
 
I keep most of my purchased scores in a wall of metal filing cabinets, so no backup for 5 decades of collecting! However, I've created a few several thousand scores—original solos, ensembles and lead sheets—in Finale and those are backed up up on external drives: one at home and one offsite (my office). Video or audio recordings of my compositions are stored on external drives and home/office and the best of the best were uploaded to live forever on YouTube, Vimeo and ReverbNation (so sorta a backup...).
 
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I am not good at this.

I keep the prints of songs that I intend to play again some time.
I have them all on my pc.
But I only occasionally back up that. Perhaps once a year. To an external harddrive that is stored in the same house as the PC, so that it would be lost too in case of a fire.

Since no media lasts forever, I think the best approach would be not to have more important data than can be stored in your current main device/pc. Anything only left in the cloud or on an external harddrive you can't be sure of, but the computer you actually use you keep updated anyway.
Then, if you have backup in the cloud and/or external harddrive, you only have a problem if that media fails at the exact same time as your computer.

I ought to get a cloud.
 
These get stored on github as well as being backed up by my normal system backup processes (cloud sync, external hard drive on site and external hard drive off site).

Thank you Arcy. I have never thought this kind of usage of github other than programming. I've found several sites suggest such usage. It is very clever for organizing and editing files and branches.
 
This thread is timely. My computer recently died, and I just threw it away. Yes, I lost some stuff like pdf files of songs I'll never play, a manuscript I'll never finish, and some photos. However, the process has been very liberating. It feels good to be disencumbered of all the stuff that I have been hording. It is a new beginning. And the photos were crystallized moments of the past. Now I have to make new memories.
 
This thread is timely. My computer recently died, and I just threw it away. Yes, I lost some stuff like pdf files of songs I'll never play, a manuscript I'll never finish, and some photos. However, the process has been very liberating. It feels good to be disencumbered of all the stuff that I have been hording. It is a new beginning. And the photos were crystallized moments of the past. Now I have to make new memories.

Get an HGST Ulstrastar internal hard drive and buy an enclosure for it. They're "Enterprise" drives, rated for 24/7 use. Don't be afraid of refurbished drives. I've used them for years.

https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=HGST+UlstraStar
 
My most precious music-related backups are recorded on an archival format Blu-Ray disc(s) called M-Disc.

M-Disc format is the dye layer of the disc which is supposed to last for over 100 yrs.

These discs are otherwise functionally identical to other forms of optical media and can be read on any Blu-Ray drive on any computer running Mac, Linux, Windows, etc.

I burn 3 identical copies of the disc, which two of them are put into different safety-deposit boxes at 2 different banks and 2 different locations 30 miles apart. The last disc goes on the shelf at home for easy access.

If I need to add to the backups, I just burn more discs.

I save the music sheets in formats of a mixture of text, PDF, MIDI, audio files, master recordings, etc.

A BluRay disc holds 50GB (fifty gigabytes) of data.

At one of the safety-deposit boxes, I also have another BluRay drive that connects via USB, brand new, in the box, just in case these are not made any more, I can still read the discs and get my files off. Eventually I will add a second spare drive to the other location.

Hard drives will eventually die from mechanical failure, as well as from something else called 'bit rot'. The motors in hard drives can get seized in place from sitting at rest, and then will just not spin up when power is applied and thus are unreadable. - Been there, done ALL of that.

USB Flash drives and SSD flash drive have a limited number of write operations, and eventually will get bricked from wear due to read/write/erase operations. I've seen it many times in the past decade. This is not long term storage, rather they are the digital equivalent of old-school floppy disks, which were ephemeral storage at best.

I live in a place too small to keep lots of paper around, so paper books, binders, print-outs are not for me. I gave them away to the library once I had everything digitized that originated from paper.

I have a big tv that has an HDMI input for anything requiring a large display for readability.

I mostly memorize whatever I am working on, and if I play in public, it's either by memorization or from a cheat-sheet on my phone that I keep in my sight.
 
This thread is timely. My computer recently died, and I just threw it away. Yes, I lost some stuff like pdf files of songs I'll never play, a manuscript I'll never finish, and some photos. However, the process has been very liberating. It feels good to be disencumbered of all the stuff that I have been hording. It is a new beginning. And the photos were crystallized moments of the past. Now I have to make new memories.

I like your attitude ripock. I feel much the same way about it, especially the tremendous amount of music that I've accumulated, most of which could be easily replaced if I lost it and actually missed it.

My thing is that my music is all over the place. I have it on my computer, I have some in dropbox, there is some on a thumb drive, there's some more on another thumb drive, and I have a couple of binders full of paper. And a lot of it is duplicates because at one time or another I wanted to be able to access the same music from different places or I wanted to back it up to put it on a new computer, so I tried to sync it all up in one way or another. But I don't keep up with it. So there is a ton of music that came along that did not make it on a thumb drive, or into a folder somewhere, or stuff that I printed and stuck in a binder and never scanned it or saved it. So then it gets to the point where I'm not sure what is where and I can't find what I'm looking for anyway so I get on the internet and find it again. Honestly, I should just go through it all and start deleting instead of saving. I'll bet a third of what I have is "backed up" in places I have no idea where it is. I'll bet there are folders out there on the internet with my music in it that I don't even know are there anymore.
 
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I completely agree with the author! Doing a backup of our data is something that every single one of us should do. With my help, you will learn how to do a backup of your emails and much more. I am hopeful that you will care about your cybersecurity more.
 
I backup my desktop data to a USB hard drive once a month. That said, hard drives from otherwise dead computers can be attached to your new computer if the new computer has a compatible operating system and you have the appropriate cable. Apps, OS and executables may not work on the old drive but data files should be okay unless your old computer failed due to a hard drive problem.
 
A few folks have mentioned storing a copy of their files offsite. Best solution I have found for that is keeping the files on the small hard drive in a bank safe deposit box. I have two of these small hard drives, and rotate them every six months or so with the latest backup.
 
I play fingerstyle melodies. I have no tab. It is all in my head. One of these days I’ll put pen to paper, so to speak, since it is getting tougher to remember all of it.

John
 
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