Musicians: Long Term Back Up of Your Multitracks and Masters!

Photo by Arn Klein

Backup your multi-tracks and your masters.

My intermediate photography instructor, Arn Klein*, told us that our photos did not count as data unless/until they were backed up three (3) times, with at least one being offsite. There are a multitude of on and offsite backup solutions now.

Locally, any sort of external HD would do and they just keep getting bigger; or you could set up Network Area Storage (NAS), which is slow but capable for of massive storage. I recommend backing up to two external hard drives, one you keep and one you give to a friend to keep away from your house. Backup software includes Time Machine, SuperDuper ($28), and Carbon Copy Cloner (donationware).

This is important: in case of HD failure (all HDs fail), flood, fire, or meteorite, I also recommend an offsite, cloud storage solution for your multi-track recordings and masters, or for that matter any digital file that you value. Your music is all you have, so find a place to store it safely.

Some offsite backup options are: Carbonite, Mozy, Dropbox, Crashplan, and Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier. Amazon S3 is more expensive but gets you instant access to your data. For these long term storage issues, you probably don't need to pay for that quicker access. For my photos, I use Amazon Glacier, which may take you up to four hours to access, but is ridiculously cheap at only 1 cent/GB per month.

Here is the Amazon S3 and Glacier pricing info:

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

Here is the info for Amazon Glacier:

http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ 

Backing up your files, whether writing, photos, or your precious music, never seems important until you need it and can't access it for some reason. If you are not backing up your digital music files, including your masters and multitracks, please put this high on your To Do list.

*Arn Klein teaches Intermediate Digital Photography at the Chicago Photography Center,

and I can't recommend his class highly enough. If you like any of the photos I've taken in the last six months, it's thanks to Arn. Most of the info in this post was shared with us by Arn during our spring photo class. Thanks, Arn!

Arn is also our featured artist for the month of December! 

Come check out his photos at the opening on Friday, Dec. 6 or anytime in December.

https://www.facebook.com/events/527598804000784/?ref=5