You have just completed the hard work of completing the mix and producing quality masters for your recording. These masters are very important to you as they will be used every time you issue an official sound recording of your track. The main question now is: “How could I possibly preserved, backup or keep my sound recording masters for long term?”
Two important aspects of in sound recording backups
1.) In your backup, keep the highest resolution version of your masters. Follow the simple rules below:
a.) If the recording is done in 24-bit, 48KHz; then keep a backup of the master at 24-bit/48KHz. There should be no dithering or sample rate conversion applied to each tracks, the mixes and the completed master. This will ensure that you have the highest quality backups of your recording. By the time, you are planning to re-distribute the tracks or even do some remixes or remastering; you will simply use these backups.
Some recording studios record at even higher resolution, for example at 24-bit/96KHz or even 24-bit/192KHz (very rare). So the same rule applies, make sure the sample rate and bit depth of your backups is the same as used during the recording of the tracks.
b.) It is also worthwhile to keep a backup of the CD audio version of each project. This is not in highest resolution format but in 16bit/44.1Khz format. The primary reason for doing this backup is that CD is the most common distribution format that you will be providing to labels, recording outlets, fans, etc. This CD master should comply with the red book standard and is professionally mastered by your trusted mastering engineer.
In addition, the mastering engineer should also be providing you high resolution MP3 masters (e.g. done at 320kbps); this are also important masters that you should be doing some backups. MP3 masters are often used in digital/online distribution of music such as in iTunes, etc. You can burn a copy of these MP3 masters in a high quality data disc or DVD or even external hard drive (more details in the coming section).
In summary, below are the common formats that you should do the backups:
a.) WAV format at highest resolution (depending on the bit depth and sample rate the project was recorded, e.g. 24-bit/48KHz, 24-bit/44.1KHz or 24-bit/96Khz, etc.)
b.) CD audio master
c.) MP3 masters
2.) You need to store these masters in a “reliable” storage media. The following are good storage medium that could preserved the quality of your masters/recordings for the long term:
a.) External hard drives – you can purchase a high quality external/high capacity hard drive such as the Western Digital 2TB storage
b.) Archival DVD Gold plated disc – gold plated DVD has a guaranteed life span of 100 years. It is because gold does not oxidize or corrode under ordinary temperature and pressure that makes these DVD a very reliable way to store data. Since DVD is a high capacity physical storage medium. You can actually preserved or archived higher resolution digital formats such as 24bit/96Khz masters as well as your mixes. One of the best archival DVD is Mitsui Gold Archive 8x DVD-R
c.) Gold CDR – gold plated CD is similar to DVD archival grade but it will have a lower capacity (usually around 650MB to 700MB). You can use this to store your CD audio masters that will be used for future replication. The recommended CD-R is Taiyo Yuden Gold CD disc
d.) Online storage solution – all the above solutions are still prone to damage by natural calamity or disaster. The last option is to back up your sound recording masters online (e.g. cloud-based solutions). You can take a look at these two popular services:
d.1) Gobbler (paid) – this cloud storage company specializes on media producers doing backups. They offer a 5GB free storage (as of August 2012) and one of key features is automatic versioning. This will ensure that you have a copy of every version you made so that you can simply revert to them when needed.
d.1) Amazon simple storage service (paid) – one of the popular cloud storage solutions. There is no fix cost for doing backups and it depends on your usage (transfer bandwidth for example).
d.2) Windows Skydrive (free) – I use this temporarily when storing some of my old important tracks. They are free but it imposes some limits which you may not like. Also they have limited storage space, so it may not be ideal for storing very big files.
Taking good care of your hard drive used by DAW
While you may be doing backups in periodic basis, you should also take care about the health of your current hard drive that is used by your DAW. Below are the signs of a problematic hard drive::
a.) Random occurrence of “blue screen” in your Windows during booting or during actual operation.
b.) You will hear a crackling sound originating from the hard drive.
c.) You will receive a lot of S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) related errors during boot-up or during operation.
d.) During booting, Windows will always automatically check the disk for errors (or even often than what is necessary)
e.) During check disk you will start to see a lot of bad sectors.
f.) The computer will start to slow down when saving files due to some disk writing/reading errors or behave very differently.
A couple days or even weeks later, a hard drive would crash. If you fail to make a backup within this period, you will not be able to recover all of your data. Since all drives will eventually fail (depending on usage, abuse, environment, etc), you should have a back-up plan in case it will stop working. Below are some methods that you can use to take care of your drives and the data.
a.) Use standard power supply for your computer and use UPS – power interruptions can damage a drive in the long term. Using a UPS can allow you to safely shutdown your PC during brownouts and prevent a hard drive damage.
b.) Well-ventilated environment – if the environment is too hot, this can increase the chances of damaging your drive.
c.) Cloning your hard drive – supposing you have a hard drive with operating system installed and not only OS but your expensive recording software as well. In addition to the recording software, you might as well have lots of plug-ins that you are using in your projects such as Waves, etc.
In the event of hard drive failure, it would be impossible to restore the original settings of your entire software/plug-in without having efficient solution. Doing static backups won’t help (copy and paste solution to other disk) to protect your currently used software (such as your OS and it’s registry). The best method is to “clone” the disk. Cloning is simply creating an “exact” replica of your current hard drive in what is called as “image” of the drive. So if the current hard drive fails, you can simply buy a new hard drive of the same size as the previous damage drive, put it back to your computer and then “restore” the image of the clone to that new drive.
This method has some benefits:
1.) You do not need to reinstall your operating system as well as all the software that goes along with it.
2.) You can be sure that your OS will restore its original settings and registry.
3.) It’s faster, because the restoration process takes only one to two hours as compared to re-installation and re-configuration of OS that can last for days.
Below is the procedure:
1.) Install a cloning software (e.g. Macrium Reflect).
2.) Scan for virus, malware and clean your current hard drive that wish to clone.
3.) Check disk (file system). Some cloning software won’t clone a drive if it has a defective file system. You need to check disk it first.
4.) Execute the cloning process and save the image to an external hard drive. This can take time, around 3 to 8 hours depending on the size of your drive.
When your hard drive finally dies and not anymore bootable:
1.) Remove the damage disk in your computer and replace it with a new one.
2.) Restore the image to the brand new hard drive. You will be using a restoration software such as Macrium reflect. You can download the free version here.
3.) Reboot and then all files will be there, your OS will then boot up normally in the new hard drive. You don’t need to re-install any of your software during the restoration process. Some useful tutorials illustrating the details of this process:
Cloning Windows hard disk with Macrium Reflect Part 1
Part 2 of the tutorial
Part 3 of cloning tutorial
You can clone your disk once in a month or every 3 months to have an updated image of your drive. There are other great backup software such as Acronis, although they don’t offer a free version.
Content last updated on August 15, 2012