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Fast and Cheap backup for DAW users

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For those of you struggling with how to back up very large drives that you use for audio in your DAWs, here is an alternative solution to the long, tedious, backup to CDR process.

Here is what I did a couple of years ago after being frustrated with trying to back up all my client's audio to CDRs or DVD-Rs.

I have two 80GB IDE drives that I use for audio (through a swappable drive enclosure), and I have clients in doing large multi-track projects pretty much everyday. It was taking WAY too much time to back everything up to CDR or DVD-R, and so I found myself neglecting it quite often until I was forced to when I ran out of hard drive space.

The best solution I found was to get a removable drive bay that I installed in the master position of my secondary IDE controller. I then bought several cheap IDE drives. You can get large IDE drives for less than $100 each now. You don't need the fast drives, because these are just for backup. Many companies make similar removable bays, I just happened to go with CRU. Below are the product names for the main removable assembly you will need for an IDE/ATA bay and individual drive cartridges. Just click on the GO button on the Amazon Search Box below (I already filled in the search terms for you) to go to the site and then look for these items:

DATAPORT V ATA 66 METAL COMPLETE ASSEMBLY (this includes one cartridge)

DATAPORT V IDE ATA 66 METAL CARTRIDGE ONLY (this is for extra cartridges)

OR, just do a search for Dataport to see other removable drive bay products.

I have at least six of these drives in removable cartridges now, plus many more bare drives that I swap in and out of the cartridges as needed. Most of them are just for backup, but one of them is a 120GB work drive that holds samples and loops.

Now, backing up my audio drives is as simple as dragging and dropping everything over in one operation to one of the backup drives. Usually by the time those backup drives get full, I can delete old stuff that isn't needed anymore, or burn stuff that I want to keep long term onto CDRs, or simply buy another drive for $100 (and the price per GB is going down everyday).

I recently started using Retrospect Backup, which is a great file backup system that will back up drive volumes incrementally, so that you don't have to do a full backup each time. It makes it even easier to manage large backup sets, and I create a backup set for each client and project that I'm working on now.

Also,I now have all my big project clients buy their own drive (still much cheaper than analog 2" tape). Then I'll back up their project after each session to their drive, and when their project is complete, they can keep their drive with them for long term storage.

Just another idea to think about. This is the best solution I've found so far, and is still much cheaper than DVD-R drives and media (at this point). CDR backup just takes WAY too long if you are trying to back up huge drives. For my own projects, I still use the prepare master funtion in Cubase when I'm done, and then I can usually fit one song per CDR (or several songs on DVD-R) for long term storage, and it's worth it for me to do that (in addition to having my stuff backed up on my removable drives) .... but I use the removable drives for regular backup duties while working on the projects.

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