General Music Chat

My desktop (Compaq) started crashing on me Wednesday morning after an automatic Windows update Tuesday night. When I could get it restarted, I started burning all my files to DVD-Rs, specially all my music (recording) files. Saturday night before going out, I set it to copy everything to a 500G USB drive. It got all my music copied, all my documents and some of the photos and videos, but I'm pretty sure I had the rest backed up on DVD already.

Went and got a new HP, 6GB RAM and 1 TB hard drive, now working on moving all the files back into place and reloading software (PITA).

Moral of the story - back up your files!!

According to my son and son in law the best way to back up files is with an external hard drive.

Purchase of same is on my agenda.

Agreed!

Is it bad when your computer starts sounding like an unleveled maytag washer with an uneven load? That's what my computer sounds like when I hit the on button.

Is it bad when your computer starts sounding like an unleveled maytag washer with an uneven load? That's what my computer sounds like when I hit the on button.

Well Slacker, take out the socks, man!

Is it bad when your computer starts sounding like an unleveled maytag washer with an uneven load? That's what my computer sounds like when I hit the on button.

Well Slacker, take out the socks, man!

And the sneakers!

Usually the noise is from a fan, but sometimes from a harddrive. Neither one is good, but fans can be quickly changed.

External drives can fail, too, so a secondary backup (on DVD-R) is always a good idea. I've contemplated uploading everything to a 'Cloud' server, too.

I have an unconventional approach to backups. I prefer to use fairly small hard disks -- the largest is a 40GB disk in my laptop, and one of my machines runs an ancient 2.5GB drive. I keep installed software to a bare minimum, and never have more than a DVD or two's worth of material saved at any given time.

I regularly back up my files to DVD-R -- two copies, stored in separate locations. In addition, I save most of my important files like work and band stuff to Dropbox, which doubles as a secure backup (though that's not the main reason I use it). I also have a few open-source projects hosted on SourceForge. Those are all publicly available and widely distributed on mirrors; I don't even keep local copies when I'm not actively working on them.

My approach takes a fair amount of knowledge and a great deal of discipline, but it's also highly effective. I can literally perform a complete nuke and reinstallation in a matter of hours, and have my machine running exactly like before afterwards. It's come in handy several times...

But I bet you can't even BUY a 40G harddrive (new) these days!

For the home recordists out there, remember to not only back up all your song files, back up your VST/VSTi plugins, too. If you pay for them (like Native Instruments for example), then you'll be registered for your software downloads, no problem. If they are freeware (I had lots of those), you'll need to hunt them down and download and install again.