While You Tune Up, Do Your Back Up

II grew up in a musical household. My brother is a musician and I am a musical hobbyist. But I work in the IT field, so I always was trying new software. While he was scoring music by hand, I was playing with finalemusic.com or sibelius.com. Until he decided to work on some published books. Then he learned the software.

When he was trying different guitars to get the right sound, I was sampling and using MIDI and synthesizers. There have been a ton of them. Many start with pure synths like the old Korgs, but soon we try to sample with the Rolands. Eventually our computers became fast enough to run software synthesizers like those from Propellerhead and likewise drum machines. So it was not too long before we had a lot of data. We had scores, midi, synth patches, samples, drum loops, and we have not even begun to consider recording our performances.

Image credit: robertrodriguezjr.com

If you are old enough, you had a number of analog tape decks, but eventually got to a nice digital recorder. Sony and Olympus and Tascam and so many others. And that meant we had built quite a library of performances in digital form. And then we burned them to a CD or DVD and had to make cover art and liner notes, so more data for the images and the words and the labels. And if we are playing gigs we need to keep track of playlists and even some accounting. Musicians, artists are never far from the world of high tech. And many of my musician friends have built a nice studio as well, and that is a lot more software for Audio. Avid pro tools are pretty amazing, as is Ableton. And some of us do videos or at least have a bunch of stills from our live performances.

But what would you do if all that data disappeared? If you could not find the tune you wrote to your first true love, or that album you have been frantically working on just failed to load and you could not find enough of the source material? Or some track is wrong, and you need to tune it up? You may just sit down, cry and write a tune about it, but it’s better to use good practice and back up your stuff. From my experience, Acronis knows backup best. They can help you backup your entire disk, so if your laptop was stolen or destroyed, you could just put everything on a new one. They can help you save all your files, the huge loseless FLAC or the many many MP3s, as well as scores and all the revisions. They know that while scoring software has gotten better, there is nothing like making adjustments. So recovering a score form a MIDI, or going from an MP3 to a MIDI to a score is a really terrible way to recover. It’s much better to know all your data is safe.

Try to estimate how many different kinds of data you have. And how much of each kind. And what software you have purchased. And all the updates you have made. Then consider having an image that can be restored to any new computer you buy, and it would just have everything. And having it stored in a cloud too, so you can recover it form anywhere in the world. Frankly, it makes much more sense for a musician to have automatic backups being done by Acronis and hopefully that rare recovery being done quickly and easily. You do not want to spend many many hours trying to rebuild everything, and they do not want you to do that either. They can take all of your data and save it away, and then, if required, recover it quickly, simply, and reliably.

Written by Joel Berman, Acronis Fellow.