“SSD drives are generally non-recoverable” - genuinely THANK YOU for sharing information that the manufacturers would definitely NOT advertise about their products. Cheers!
Totally not a secret. SSD have never been reliable for archival storage and were never designed or advertised to be so. It's basically long term RAM. It is susceptible to Physical shock, Static, all kins of stuff. SSD are WORK DRIVES ONLY and should be treated as such.
The best assumption is to prepare for any and all of your drives to eventually fail. That way you can just keep working. Backblaze in addition to multiple physical copies is a great strategy.
You will get a warning some time ahead of reaching the ammount of read/writes they arespecified at. They dont just crash like a Spinner does. but data may start to get unreliable, as the drive starts to get areas on the nand chips that is being marked as bad. It's actually much like a Spinner just with chips instead of a metal platter. When it starts to degrade the adegraded areas will spread to other areas over some time. Have used SSD's right since they were still expensive, but they are so much faster that there isn't any reason why you wouldn't use them. They are reliable enough for use in high performance NAS systems, but keep in mind these are still for "work load" Finnished files is usually backed up on a high capacity Spinner drive NAS. It is exactly the same as with a spinner drive. When you start to bad sectors (that are relocsted to another god area automatic), it is time to go buy a new drive before you loose your data.
@@platterjockey I think it depends on which part of the drive goes bad. If you still have a readable partition table, you can recover, at least partly. But you cannot recover if e.g. the controller chip went away. A few weeks ago, I was able to get about 80% of data back from a broken SSD, but just because I had some luck. It was still able to read, but the spare cells were gone and it denied to write. This is the "ordinary" way for and SSD to die, this is why it's good practice not to use it as a swap and prevent having loads of writes in it, but it doesn't mean the whole thing cannot turn to a paperweight.
I make electronic music so I don't necessarily work with clients but my solution to this problem is store everything on DropBox and then have DropBox make a local copy on a 6TB hard drive. That way any time the hard drive is connected to my computer it syncs files. When I know I'm going to be traveling I have an SSD I load specific sessions or project files on to then I make sure I put them back on the backup hard drive when I get home. If I happen to start a new project while im traveling I'll save it on the SSD and upload the file to Dropbox at the same time to. Not sure if this is a system that would work for everyone but it's worked for me since 2017 and I've never lost a session file as a result.
I have to correct you here Colt, SSD drives are safer than spinning disk drives. They can take drops/bangs better, they don't wear out since there are no moving parts, and (on average) last longer than spinning disk drives. The caveat is that when they go bad, as you mentioned, you cannot recover information as easily as on a spinning disk drive. I have learned over the years that there is only one sytem that can keep your data safe and apocalypse-proof: - Make sure all your drives(internal and external) are from big reputable brands - Run software and os on your computer's internal ssd(don't use spinning disk drives for internal storage as they are slower and less reliable than ssd drives) - If you don't have much storage space/need to travel, use an external ssd for save files - Back up internal ssd(and external ssd for save files if you have one) to a spinning disk drive - Back up that spinning disk drive to the cloud This is the 1 2 3 rule. 1 piece of data in two different locations(In your studio and on the cloud) on 3 different storage types(ssd, spinning disk and cloud).
A local (fast) RAID vault (mirrored drives, RAID 1) is definitely a must have, and then also regular frequent backups to the Cloud for long-term storage is a must (eg. AWS, Azure, Google, iCloud, etc.). It's totally worth it to pay a little extra money each month to get a bunch of disk space on one of these big Cloud providers to back up your data. If there is a fire or flood at your house, or a robbery, or some other natural disaster, there is no substitute for having all of your critical data backed up in the Cloud.
@@Barney-ii1no the local RAID vault I am referring to above is for mirrored drives (not striped), so mirroring cuts your available storage space in half but it gives you the extra redundancy that makes it much safer (not 100% safe, but probably 99.999% safe), and it is also important to use hard drives made specifically for NAS devices, like the Seagate Ironwolf Pro for Enterprise NAS, just as one example. Don't just throw in any 7,200 rpm drive in your NAS, use new drives that are specially made for NAS RAID devices. This is convenient because a local thunderbolt NAS vault is fast, and then you also need backup your data to a major Cloud service every few days like Colt mentions in his video. Just as an example, AWS S3 or Azure Blob storage are both 99.9999999% reliable Cloud storage (people call this nine 9's reliability).
25 years in the IT field here. There are around ten different versions of RAID and it all depends on the level of fault tolerance you're looking for. You can have RAID arrays that require at least 3, 4 or more hard drives, but then the total storage available goes down. But it also depends on what you want to focus on in regard to performance, reading data, writing data or maybe both. My workflow is to SSD first, long term storage on a RAID array and then cloud backup for sharing and longer-term storage since that doesn't rely on hardware that I need to maintain. None of it is permanent - I've even seen total RAID failures in my experience - so 3 independent backups is a good solution for anything that critical. Always have one backup that is offsite and not in the same physical location as the other 2.
By using your SSDs as session drives, you are driving them to an early demise, hastening them to that failure point. With latency in recording an issue, most definitely, create a recording session on an SSD. After the recording process is finished, save the project to a platter for editing where latency it no longer an issue.
Hey Colt I play in a band called Mastering the Digital Journey. I had a 4 GB hard drive fail on me two years ago, and I just threw it in a drawer. Since then, my original rhythm guitar player passed away because he was unfortunately messing with fentanyl. Watching your video, I was able to recover all the material on that drive, and now I am including my original guitar player on the rhythm tracks of our upcoming album. Thanks to you, I can't express how appreciative I am of this video. Even writing this message brings me to tears. Heartfelt thank you.
I just recovered and converted over 12TB of older Protools sessions for re-mastering! A good practice is to also take your Third Master location completely Offline! What do I mean.. Literally take the HD out of the NAS and put it into an Anti Static Bag and Store it! I have Physical HD's that I have done this with that I have used for 25+ years with no Issues! Another thing that I do for legacy Items is Burn them on Blu-ray Discs or Tape Media, this would be items that you don't need access to often but are important for archival purposes! Disc's are Slow to burn and recover but are bulletproof if stored well! SSD's have batteries on board to retain data when they are not plugged in and will lose data if not plugged in for long periods of time, so you can't use an SSD for this but physical media is always the best! Be careful with the Docks also especially with newer computers and especially the Apple Silicon Models because the TOC and Management of the drive for physical drives is very different from SSD's so a newer comp could actually corrupt your drive over time! Also companies are removing legacy drivers and support for older drives because they just aren't being used by the masses so a company like OWC are great for Legacy support and Chipsets that support both Older components and Newer ones! Apple's newer chips keep the controller off the drive and on the main SOC instead, this makes them faster than standard single SSD's but since they use multiple nands that have no onboard controller, if the comp dies it takes everything with it so always use an external drive for everything important on Mac! Cheers!
Cloud backups are great if you can’t have redundant physical backups. But you’re still relying on an Internet connection to get back to your files. And you’re putting your faith in that company that they will never have a data loss. So it would not be the only backup, I would use, but definitely a useful option
@@ColtCapperrune Backblaze is the 3rd backup place. They can send you a HD with your datas if you loss your other backups. There is no limit of storage for the price you pay. We use it as the 3rd backup place for 2 companies (2nd is a NAS that is duplicated in Dropbox servers). And Backblaze's standards are those of a backup facility. It's way more secure than Dropbox/iCloud/One which are btw not claiming that the data you put in their clouds is safe. Last, if you can put the NAS out of your main room, it's better, as the 2nd drive is supposed not to be in the same room as the primary (flood/fire/etc.).
@@ColtCapperrune actually no, you won't need to download the files if you have data loss. Backblaze do send you a hard drive with your data if you wish!
My original skills are in tech. So I have a NAS with a RAID 5+1 array. That then backs up to G-Drive. If a drive fails.. which I hate to be contrarian.. doesn't matter what you buy, it will fail eventually. but when a drive fails i just swap it with another one, the parity rebuilds itself and i'm good to go.
When it comes to storing files, once you get to the point of making music as a “proper” business, you should be using a RAID 5 (or better) NAS/DAS as backup storage. These require a small bit of investment as you’ll need a NAS/DAS system and the relevant hard drives (albeit will save you money over the long run). But proper storage of files is absolutely critical once you hit a certain level. It is just a professionalism thing. You can’t be losing files or having downtime because of storage issues
Hey Colt, couple of things to add, don't know with Pro Tools, but with Logic Pro, you need to close your current project if you want to back it up, if still open, the project is locked. Sight... Regarding the tiering backups, you should always keep an offline copy outside of your house (fire, burglary, cyber attack,...). Cyber Attack is still something that could happen to us, what would you do if you end up of having all your data encrypted and asking for a ransoms to decrypt it ? Answer : offline copy. Most likely, if your backup disk connected to your computer, It is compromised too.
Something else to consider is a network storage server with many hard drives. I'm not too familiar with the different raid versions, but there's one that spreads the data across multiple disks in such a way that there's enough redundancy to replace up to 2 failed drives, but you're still able to use more than 50% of the total storage.
Well, I just have gone through it too. I back up from SSD to hard drive and I back up Google Drive automatically. Why not consider cloud simultaneous back up too?
Colt - Another thought just occurred to me... When using RAID-1 (two HDDs, mirrored), you have a very robust storage solution indeed. HOWEVER... Be proactive and have, on hand, at least (1) additional HDD (same type as in your RAID) . This can then be swapped in to your RAID if you ever start to experience storage failures. I keep (2) HDDS on hand just because. It's a fairly expensive contingency but you want to make sure every drive in that usage group is IDENTICAL in storage and performance specs. Oh, and speaking of performance specs, besides RPM (eg, 7200), you want to get the fastest READ/WRITE speeds you can in your HDDs. Big Write-buffer cache is also a must too. These two operating parameters are the most common causes of DAW buffer underflows; your CPU might be sitting around waiting for your storage drives to read or write data streams. For example: transfer a large data file to an HDD (or even SSD) and, after a few seconds, you might see its performance PLUMMET if you exceed its write cache. As per my previous comment, get the best SSD/HDD you can afford for audio production use. Cheers!
Do you keep your backup drives connected at all times, just not in use? Or do you only connect them when you're going to back up? I've been leaving my backup drive connected at all times for ease of use, but if that also kills its lifetime faster, then I need to unmount it.
I bought myself a raid years ago when I was collecting movies and tv shows. We didn't have cable and I would add the videos into iTunes, then we would use our Wii wirelessly connecting to my Mac Mini to get access to everything. Kept my iTunes library on the external and we could easily watch whatever we wanted to. It was a 4 disc setup and I think each disc was 2TB bc they had become much cheaper. I was using an eSATA connection from the Mini and had the drives set to RAID 5. Raid 5 needs at least 3 discs and that shares the parity information (the data needed to reconstruct missing data) is spread across all drives. So if you get the flashing red light one day that disc 3 has gone bad, you have a spare identical drive handy and you just remove it and slot the new drive in. The system will recognize the new drive then proceed to rebuild the missing data on the new disc. It was pretty cool and I wasn't using it for anything truly mission critical, but it made sense. Also had family photos and things like that saved there.
So please forgive me if i missed it but, if time machine missed the backup from your recording/princaple #1 drive & that drive died, didnt the back up drive have most of the stuff on it? I record to ssd & use super duper at the end of my work day to back up to a clone ssd of my primary as well as backup the system drive every few days to another drive. so far so good. 🤞🤞🤞
I’ve lost files before (even with having backup drives) and it is a nightmare. I now work off of SSD, have a backup of all info on a disk drive, and use Backblaze to back up to the cloud every day. I realized God forbid my house ever burn down or get hit by a bad storm I could potentially lose everything I’ve ever worked on in my entire life unless I have everything in the cloud or a drive in another location. Losing those files really got me thinking of how to never ever lose something again. It was terrible.
I worked the last 20years, before I retired in computer support and this is good info for everybody! I was always taught that your data isn't safe, unless you have at least 3 backups! On top of that, at least one of those backups need to be off site! Now that I'm retired, I can't afford the off sight backup. My fix for that is to at least store that 3rd copy, in a fire safe box at the outer corner of my garage! This in theory is the safest place for that off chance of a fire! Yes, that solid state drive is good for speed, but not for backup!😁
In a similar boat for years, Colt. Have you used so many different types of drives over the years. Now, with terabytes of Kontakt libraries, etc. etc. Been looking into a NAS/Server set up or an OWC 1UR. Lots of great benefits to hone in 15+ TB into an SSD network solution in a rackmount frame. Been going down the rabbit hole! Great channel, Colt.
I've been using the Samsung T7 for years. I've never had a problem with a single one of them. At this point, I've gone through five of them. Even my oldest ones still work perfectly.
I like the idea of a hard drive dock, i back up to the cloud, and have a dock that holds 2 drives. When i am done for the day i can click a button on the dock and clone my main drive to a backup. Makes the process much easier. You should check it out!
I have had a few hard drives fail, and it cost me an arm and a leg to recover "most" of the data. I was not aware that the SSD was non - recoverable. Thank you for posting this video and information. Having experienced the great pain and agony of losing so many important files, photos, etc., I will be making changes ASAP. Thank You
it is not factual that an ssd cant be recovered have a look on youtube there are plenty of videos showing it can be done and how to do it but it isn't easy, not ALL ssd's can be recoverable tho
I'm having roughly the same problem right now. I have a RAID1 NAS and always make a system backup of my complete PC on Sunday. But on Saturday the system hard disk broke, luckily I didn't do much during the week, so the loss is not that big.
A heads uo for you guys, you dont always want a faster spinning hard drive. Disk speeds up to 5600rpm are more than fast enough, the faster the RPM the less stable the drive can become!
Ive been there several times LOL I work off an M.2 NVME drive, back up to an archive HDD drive internally THEN i have 2 of those docks that i backup again to onto sata Enterprise HDD's (they are built tougher and made to run longer). I let go of the RAID i had..it's getting antiquated and there's still a risk of loosing your data if one of the drives fail depending on the RAID type you have. Several of my friends are also backing up to "cloud" so they have an offsite backup, so I'm considering that as well.
I know having a few hard drives is a lot but definitely look into cloud backup as well. Backblaze is what I use (inexpensive and simple) but there are plenty of others. I have main SSD, backup SSD (for in-session backup), backup HDD and Backblaze. Had one scare and haven't taken any risks since and thankful I've been doing this system for a while now!
I use the redundant hard drives plus cloud back up technique. SSD inside the computer handles the session, end of the session I clone it to an external SSD, then back up to the cloud server. Only takes losing files once to whip you into shape real quick!
Cloud backup service, preferably automated. Learned it the hard way. I keep my system drive rather small - and backup an actual image, so I could just reinstate that to another physical drive and start over. Project files, valuable media and the likes get backups to secondary and tertiary physical drives. If you want it cheaper, you could leave out the cloud and backup to two different drives alternating. But ever since my own dilemma, I follow the 3-2-1 rule. Important stuff in three instances. Two backups - of which one has to be off-site.
I dislike Apple's native services like Time Machine and iCloud. Both can be very clunky and prone to missing data. I also like to know exactly where my files are located. In my workflow I run all my ongoing sessions from my computer hard drive. I keep a consolidated version of the final master on my hard drive for recall and move the full session to a backup when finished. Thankfully I haven't experienced losing a hard drive outright. For proper hard drive care I recommend the following: 1-Where possible only power hard drives when transferring and avoid transferring to and/or from for long hours at a time to avoid overheating 2-Avoid powering on and off in short intervals 3-Always follow proper ejection procedure 4-Avoid operating at extreme high or low temperatures 5-Make sure to use quality cables that are the correct compatibility. Too much or too little power can not only prevent proper performance but also damage the electronics 6-Unplug during electrical storms and power outages to avoid surges 7-Transport carefully and store in a dry, climate controlled location 8-Though sometimes reformatting is recommended, avoid writing and rewriting over the same hard drive multiples time. Much like a phone battery, the stability of a hard drive gets weaker each time a block is erased and rewritten 9-Avoid close proximity to magnets
Thank you for the insight! I always thought I was cheap because my Backup is not SSD. Turns out I’m smart lol What happened to your backup when you lost the 3 months of work? Did it not work?
Same thing happened to me. What I do is, every artist I work with has their own 256GB drive. I back up to a NAS drive. THIS WORKS and keeps your clients ssd fresh. Hope this helps.
I backup to a cloud service and to platter hard drives. The backup hard drives are again copied to other backup platter hard drives. Not just the data. I also do a full image backup of my computer to two separate hard drives. Redundancy is key, as ssd and platter hard drives WILL crash at some point. It will get spendy, but you'll sleep better.
Setup a multi drive NAS with a RAID array, only one of the hard drives is redundant, if at anytime one HD fails you just put another in and the RAID array rebuilds itself. You can also use SMART to monitor the drives health. This is how we have our company setup (we also backup to an offline server but we're dealing with sensitive data so we really need all the redundancy we can get). You can use a pre-made solution (Synology is very good, just add drives and configure) or use any old PC with TrueNAS with is free.
I like your recording advice but your IT advice is not good. RAID 1 is OK but it offers no protection against data corruption, fires etc. If you are running a business, you need to have your data backed up to the cloud regularly and automatically. Apple doesn't have any business grade offerings that I'm aware of. It should be something like Amazon S3 or maybe Google Drive. The storage costs are significantly lower than buying hard drives and you won't lose your data.
As someone who has recently changed their entire data structure and did a lot of research I can recommend a service called BACKBLAZE. They cost 9$ per month and do automatic cloud backups of all your data, NO DATS LIMIT. With Dropbox, iCloud or Google Drive you have limited storage and it gets really expensive if you store lots of data over the years. I currently have 7,5 TB of data backed up and on two hard drives locally and still only pay the 9$. If your hard drives die, get stolen or your house burns down, Backblaze send you a hard drive with all your stuff so you don't even have to download terrabytes over terrabytes. If you send the hard drive back after copying the data again, they even refund you for the hard drive they sent you. It's cheap, it's straight to the point and no bullshit...can only recommend their service!
@scottakam Haven’t lost a project in 150 major label projects and my backup scheme has been called impeccable so agree to disagree. Best of luck though! Lots of ways to protect data better than all my 2” days. And Exabytes.
The days of unlimited Google Drive are gone, and the only way more space is to add more users. This is cost prohibitive for a lot of small business. I was given about a month to move about 50TB or lose it.
You said at the start that you were using Time Machine on Apple to create a backup of your main hard drive but didn't explain why that failed. Shouldn't' the sessions have been recoverable from that?
A few things: HARD DRIVES SOLD IN ENCLOSURES WILL INVARIABLY OVERHEAT AND FAIL. You hope it’s the controller card first, and in time enough for you ‘shuck’ and put the HDD in a fanned enclosure. I built a little 2 2” fan stand that blows through the vents while I transfer data onto newly-purchased ELEMENT or PASSPORT drive-makes a 10-20° difference. Then I remove the casing [voids warranty-but if you can use the same fan stand technique until the warranty expires, go for it] and into a new fanned enclosure it goes. USE A SERVER_GRADE HDD. Mount in a fanned enclosure. Using them for years, no failures yet. BACK UP AND TURN OFF THE BACK UP. Seems like a simple thing, but keep the mileage down. GET A HDD HEALTH MONITORING SYSTEM like Hard Disk Sentinel. Gives temperature [current and lifetime] and health of the drive and hours remaining.
Disk HDDs come in three speeds, 5600, 7200, and 10,000. Speed effects latency but also noise and wear life (heat, etc). Latency isn't really an issue for basic back up tasks in the background. However, I agree, 7200 is the best choice. 10,000 is considerably quicker but disk life is affected and again, as a backup drive, the latency isn't really an issue to pay so much extra for.
RAID 10 with physical HDD. I've seen music producers insist on getting SDDs for their zero noise benefit. Get 4 drives and set them up in a RAID 10, route your audio gear to another room, or put the drives in a RAID enclosure and put the enclosure in another room for zero noise. Mine are in a water cooled enclosure and noise is pretty much nil. WD Black drives are pretty quiet.
7:48 I strongly advise against these docks, I used them for a long time and they tend to destroy the connections and create writing errors. I almost lost 2 discs like that. I used Icybox, never again for me.... I copy on several SSDs + a backup on an online solution...
The best way that I use in my studio is a synology network backup with seagate iron wolf drives when it senses a drive going bad it instantly takes the data off of it and you don’t loose information I have 32 terabytes but I’m upgrading to 48 terabytes with 20 gig fiber connection to my whole studio even my Mac laptop backs up to it wirelessly but my whole network is ubiquity pro and tons of Dante preamps and digital audio labs headphone system my latency is 186 micro seconds not milliseconds it’s faster than a guitar cable lol
Backing up isn't just to protect against hardware failures, it's also good in case of a virus/malware infection! A fellow musician friend of mine just infected his computer this past weekend and doesn't have a full image backup of his computer. Gonna be a major pain to reinstall Windows, then his apps, the his plugins...THEN reactivate all his licenses.
This is interesting. So far, I´ve had 4 SSD´S working as sample library and project drives with no issues and still have the 4 HHD drives they replaced. The HHD spinners all failed at some point and were reformatted to be usable.. However, I may buy a new one just to store duplicates of my projects and system. Thanks...good vid!
Having physical backups is important but honestly, services like Backblaze are SO cheap for the piece of mind they provide that its kinda crazy not to use one. Its like $100 a year to backup a computer and every harddrive hooked up to it. Constantly updating, AND versioning. Great to count on your own backup system, but this is a good insurance policy.
25 years of PT data. after a few traumatic catastrophes, i've settled on a 94T synology raid, backblaze™, 25 gig bluray disc burns after each project completes, and redundant data on 2 PT rigs (studio & home).
I still have a demo on cassete tape.. and it still pays butefully.... lost almost all my work hard drives are a no-no... Still have one demo. on a cd but since its scratch i cannot listen to it. The rest is all lost... the only exception is my cd's sent by mail whit the stamps whit rhe date on hit but there are sealed for my composing rigths. Obiously I connot open them. These sould be ok.
If you're business or livelihood is dependent on file storage, set up a RAID on NAS, running on a virtually free old junk PC (from 10 years ago). Software to run RAID/NAS like TruNas or OMV are free. Also don't backup once every 3 days. Let it sync every hour. All hard drive will fail, eventually.
Givern that SSD's have a limited lifespan, in terms of number of write operations.... I only use them for content I will primarily be reading only... so sample librariies. For recording audio, I still use "old" mechanical platter drives (7200 ). But to Colt's point, you should ideally be backing up everything anyhow, be dilligent, irrespective of drive "type"... and ideally offsite/clouid-based.. . as a final safety net Manage risk :)
For decades my motto and law has been... "It's time to backup whenever you've done more work than you care to redo". I've been running a separate server computer since the mid 1990's (reveals my old age lol). My current one uses multiple 10,000 RPM mechanical drives with RAID, redundant LAN ports, redundant power supplies and redundant battery backups. I copy my DAW workstation files to its own separate external HDD's (yes, two of them), then to the server. I frequently copy completed client folders to client supplied memory sticks too. I know it's overkill but one can't be too careful. I remember the old days of the popular but unreliable "Colorado Tape Drives" and was burned by them too many times to continue using them. Once optical drives came out I'd burn project folders to DVD's but those would fail too. Today's inexpensive external drive chassis and pocket drives have made backups a lot more reliable. It's a good time to be in both music and tech. But... you must remember to backup. And if using backup software, it's important to let it verify your backups too.
I wanted to share my solution for backups. I have 2 m.2 ssds in my PC, 1 for OS/DAW/Plugins (Western Digital Black) and 1 for Audio/Sample (Samsung 990). The whole Audio/Sample Drive is backed up to the cloud (Microsoft OneDrive) and backs up as I work. If I'm on the road I work off my external m.2 ssd (Samsung 990) in a fancy enclosure (Asus ROG Arion), at the end of the session the whole protools session folder gets uploaded to the cloud (Microsoft OneDrive for me) and shared with the client. At the same time, the session downloads to my PC. This gives me a working drive (external ssd), a physical backup (my PC), a cloud backup and potentially an off-site backup (client download). Due to paranoia, I do also have an archive m.2 ssd drive, that is also backed up to the cloud (Google Drive).
100% have a copy on the cloud. There are many options out there. Then have 1 copy on a 4-Bay Raid, not 2-Bay, because it will make it easier to expand later down the line.
I remember this story from your previous video; thank you so much for the advice to not use SSDs as backup drives. :D It helped me tremendously. HDD all the way for me. Also, the docking stations look really convenient!
The best rule is the 3-2-1 rule. Maintain 3 copies of your data: This includes the original data and at least two copies. Use 2 different types of media for storage: Store your data on two distinct forms of media to enhance redundancy. Keep at least 1 copy off-site: To ensure data safety, have one backup copy stored in an off-site location, separate from your primary data and on-site backups. Drive 1 - is my primary daily driver (SSD / NVME) Drive 2 - is a backed up copy of my projects folder to another physical drive on my server (7200rpm spinning disc) Drive 3 - Daily Cloud Backups to my cloud provider
I had my hard drive crash really early on after getting my digital console in 2004.. 2 years of recordings and jams etc. Lost all confidence in all gear and felt like I knew nothing. Clients called me unprofessional , didn't record anyone again for years.
M.Disc… If it’s done/completed/finished, just write it to a Millenium disc. Easier to store and read, forever, without fail-capable moving or electronic parts. Second best option after magnetic stripe. Just store it in a fail-safe, fire/heat resistant storage (just as HDD or SSD). Cheers.
YUp we all learn the HARD way. Since i had that happen to me 12 years ago & now run all EXTERNAL "SAMSUNG T7 SSD Drive for #1Audio/ Projects, #2 Sound LIBRARY, #3 Video/PIcs for MOVIE's YT. Plus 2 8TB EXT. HHD ( CLONED ) for Archives BACK UP PROJECTS & all other SSD's. then of course TIME MACHINE Ext. HD
Buy a NAS for backups. This way, you can be sure that you will no longer have USB problems. And you no longer have to be physically at the disk/USB dock when you are away from home.
If someone else has commented but forgive me. The first thing is to define a recovery time objective rto and then a recovery point objective rpo. I would also suggest the biggest risk these days would be malware and ransomware. It could cause the client to lose ip intellectual property over their work
Hey Colt, Man that’s an awful thing to go through. Thanks for the video. I just replace my five year old internal drive in my iMac to a Crucial 2TB SSD and backup to two outboard LACIE drives as well (7200rpm) I’m interested in replacing those with that raid system. Blessings, Jamie 🙏🏼💛
Thank you so much for this share my former fellow Peorian Brother from another Mother! I was actually recently exploring a wireless NAS system to implement in my backup ecosystem. Great content! "Keep Doing That Voodoo That You Do!" 👊😉
Whatever you do, please don't use RAID 5. I personally use RAIDZ3. It takes at least 5 disks to function as intended, but I can have up to 3 disks fail without data loss, and disk failure during resilvering (data restoration) is a valid concern since the disks are working much harder.
Not to be that guy, but I had a raid that was incorrectly connected to each bay in manufacture. Everything was fine till a drive failed and the software wanted a blank drive. Then it simply mangled all the data over all the drives as it was incorrectly spanning. Killed the lot. If you have a lot of data tape is still king.
Dude I was wondering what the hell you were doing… I’ve been using a NAS with network drive since 2017….. everyone who was using HDDs in since 2000s knows these disks always fail….fast forward 7 years I have been using my Synology 1815+ I have 72 Terabytes at this point. And that entire NAS is backed up with Amazon.
The issue with a NAS(raid Box) is that the NAS box itself can go bad I had a Netgear NAS one that used for 9 years one day it stoped working. Nothing wrong with the hard drives it was the NAS itself. Guess what? I could not take those hard drives out and use them because the Netgear used something proprietary on the hard drives making good hard drives useless unless I want to reformat them on another system and use them again. I would say you need 2 NAS (raid boxes)
I had a problem like that with a customer once too, and if its a more advanced RAID even data recovery labs are going to struggle getting that back. Some of the newer NAS units have cloud backup ability, that's where its at, just have to periodically monitor. Always have to make sure there isn't any singular failure point that can hose you. Cloud backups can take a while, but if the NAS is doing it time isn't as much of a factor.
What on earth??? who only relies on one or two hard drives in a pro studio? at the end of each day, ALL my data is in a MINIMUM of three places. And I always take at least one of those drives home so that all my data is in a minimum of two separate physical places.
The health of harddrives is monitored. The health of cheap SSD's is not. Soooo, for storage on long term... when you put them in a drawer, harddrives are better. A damaged harddrive, connected over USB usually shortly comes to life so you can save the data.
🤣🤣Mine unmounted just yesterday while am bzy making beats to send to an artist..... I recovered the data thru with other software en transferred it all to a new external hard drive jxt finished right now took 10hrs
“SSD drives are generally non-recoverable” - genuinely THANK YOU for sharing information that the manufacturers would definitely NOT advertise about their products. Cheers!
Totally not a secret. SSD have never been reliable for archival storage and were never designed or advertised to be so. It's basically long term RAM. It is susceptible to Physical shock, Static, all kins of stuff. SSD are WORK DRIVES ONLY and should be treated as such.
The best assumption is to prepare for any and all of your drives to eventually fail. That way you can just keep working. Backblaze in addition to multiple physical copies is a great strategy.
You will get a warning some time ahead of reaching the ammount of read/writes they arespecified at. They dont just crash like a Spinner does. but data may start to get unreliable, as the drive starts to get areas on the nand chips that is being marked as bad. It's actually much like a Spinner just with chips instead of a metal platter. When it starts to degrade the adegraded areas will spread to other areas over some time. Have used SSD's right since they were still expensive, but they are so much faster that there isn't any reason why you wouldn't use them. They are reliable enough for use in high performance NAS systems, but keep in mind these are still for "work load" Finnished files is usually backed up on a high capacity Spinner drive NAS. It is exactly the same as with a spinner drive. When you start to bad sectors (that are relocsted to another god area automatic), it is time to go buy a new drive before you loose your data.
SSD can be recovered, but it isn't easy.
@@platterjockey I think it depends on which part of the drive goes bad. If you still have a readable partition table, you can recover, at least partly. But you cannot recover if e.g. the controller chip went away. A few weeks ago, I was able to get about 80% of data back from a broken SSD, but just because I had some luck. It was still able to read, but the spare cells were gone and it denied to write. This is the "ordinary" way for and SSD to die, this is why it's good practice not to use it as a swap and prevent having loads of writes in it, but it doesn't mean the whole thing cannot turn to a paperweight.
I make electronic music so I don't necessarily work with clients but my solution to this problem is store everything on DropBox and then have DropBox make a local copy on a 6TB hard drive. That way any time the hard drive is connected to my computer it syncs files.
When I know I'm going to be traveling I have an SSD I load specific sessions or project files on to then I make sure I put them back on the backup hard drive when I get home. If I happen to start a new project while im traveling I'll save it on the SSD and upload the file to Dropbox at the same time to. Not sure if this is a system that would work for everyone but it's worked for me since 2017 and I've never lost a session file as a result.
I have to correct you here Colt, SSD drives are safer than spinning disk drives. They can take drops/bangs better, they don't wear out since there are no moving parts, and (on average) last longer than spinning disk drives. The caveat is that when they go bad, as you mentioned, you cannot recover information as easily as on a spinning disk drive. I have learned over the years that there is only one sytem that can keep your data safe and apocalypse-proof:
- Make sure all your drives(internal and external) are from big reputable brands
- Run software and os on your computer's internal ssd(don't use spinning disk drives for internal storage as they are slower and less reliable than ssd drives)
- If you don't have much storage space/need to travel, use an external ssd for save files
- Back up internal ssd(and external ssd for save files if you have one) to a spinning disk drive
- Back up that spinning disk drive to the cloud
This is the 1 2 3 rule. 1 piece of data in two different locations(In your studio and on the cloud) on 3 different storage types(ssd, spinning disk and cloud).
I lost my "C" drive when my internal 2 month old ssd suddenly died.
@@musicriver4203 ah man that sucks, these things happen!!!! Hope it's all ok now?
I always buy 2 hard drives - a master and a backup. Saves a lot of heartache.
yep! Add the 3rd drive and do an off site backup once a month also. place burns to the ground, you got most of your data.
A local (fast) RAID vault (mirrored drives, RAID 1) is definitely a must have, and then also regular frequent backups to the Cloud for long-term storage is a must (eg. AWS, Azure, Google, iCloud, etc.). It's totally worth it to pay a little extra money each month to get a bunch of disk space on one of these big Cloud providers to back up your data. If there is a fire or flood at your house, or a robbery, or some other natural disaster, there is no substitute for having all of your critical data backed up in the Cloud.
heard some horror stories of people just having everything on raid and then end up losing everything
@@Barney-ii1no the local RAID vault I am referring to above is for mirrored drives (not striped), so mirroring cuts your available storage space in half but it gives you the extra redundancy that makes it much safer (not 100% safe, but probably 99.999% safe), and it is also important to use hard drives made specifically for NAS devices, like the Seagate Ironwolf Pro for Enterprise NAS, just as one example. Don't just throw in any 7,200 rpm drive in your NAS, use new drives that are specially made for NAS RAID devices. This is convenient because a local thunderbolt NAS vault is fast, and then you also need backup your data to a major Cloud service every few days like Colt mentions in his video. Just as an example, AWS S3 or Azure Blob storage are both 99.9999999% reliable Cloud storage (people call this nine 9's reliability).
You could also get the same result without spending as much money through a NAS system
25 years in the IT field here. There are around ten different versions of RAID and it all depends on the level of fault tolerance you're looking for. You can have RAID arrays that require at least 3, 4 or more hard drives, but then the total storage available goes down. But it also depends on what you want to focus on in regard to performance, reading data, writing data or maybe both. My workflow is to SSD first, long term storage on a RAID array and then cloud backup for sharing and longer-term storage since that doesn't rely on hardware that I need to maintain. None of it is permanent - I've even seen total RAID failures in my experience - so 3 independent backups is a good solution for anything that critical. Always have one backup that is offsite and not in the same physical location as the other 2.
I love the new background. I can't wait for the studio tour! Always leveling up.
By using your SSDs as session drives, you are driving them to an early demise, hastening them to that failure point. With latency in recording an issue, most definitely, create a recording session on an SSD. After the recording process is finished, save the project to a platter for editing where latency it no longer an issue.
Hey Colt I play in a band called Mastering the Digital Journey. I had a 4 GB hard drive fail on me two years ago, and I just threw it in a drawer. Since then, my original rhythm guitar player passed away because he was unfortunately messing with fentanyl. Watching your video, I was able to recover all the material on that drive, and now I am including my original guitar player on the rhythm tracks of our upcoming album. Thanks to you, I can't express how appreciative I am of this video. Even writing this message brings me to tears. Heartfelt thank you.
I just recovered and converted over 12TB of older Protools sessions for re-mastering! A good practice is to also take your Third Master location completely Offline! What do I mean.. Literally take the HD out of the NAS and put it into an Anti Static Bag and Store it! I have Physical HD's that I have done this with that I have used for 25+ years with no Issues! Another thing that I do for legacy Items is Burn them on Blu-ray Discs or Tape Media, this would be items that you don't need access to often but are important for archival purposes! Disc's are Slow to burn and recover but are bulletproof if stored well! SSD's have batteries on board to retain data when they are not plugged in and will lose data if not plugged in for long periods of time, so you can't use an SSD for this but physical media is always the best! Be careful with the Docks also especially with newer computers and especially the Apple Silicon Models because the TOC and Management of the drive for physical drives is very different from SSD's so a newer comp could actually corrupt your drive over time! Also companies are removing legacy drivers and support for older drives because they just aren't being used by the masses so a company like OWC are great for Legacy support and Chipsets that support both Older components and Newer ones! Apple's newer chips keep the controller off the drive and on the main SOC instead, this makes them faster than standard single SSD's but since they use multiple nands that have no onboard controller, if the comp dies it takes everything with it so always use an external drive for everything important on Mac! Cheers!
Everyone should be backing up to the cloud. Backblaze is great and super easy. Have at least one physical backup and the cloud.
Cloud backups are great if you can’t have redundant physical backups. But you’re still relying on an Internet connection to get back to your files. And you’re putting your faith in that company that they will never have a data loss. So it would not be the only backup, I would use, but definitely a useful option
Nope, no cloud storage for me 😶🌫️
@@ColtCapperrune Backblaze is the 3rd backup place. They can send you a HD with your datas if you loss your other backups. There is no limit of storage for the price you pay. We use it as the 3rd backup place for 2 companies (2nd is a NAS that is duplicated in Dropbox servers). And Backblaze's standards are those of a backup facility. It's way more secure than Dropbox/iCloud/One which are btw not claiming that the data you put in their clouds is safe. Last, if you can put the NAS out of your main room, it's better, as the 2nd drive is supposed not to be in the same room as the primary (flood/fire/etc.).
@@ColtCapperrune actually no, you won't need to download the files if you have data loss. Backblaze do send you a hard drive with your data if you wish!
@@Studio22mix...what if your place burns down? I hope you at least have a physical clone of your data in a different house
My original skills are in tech. So I have a NAS with a RAID 5+1 array. That then backs up to G-Drive.
If a drive fails.. which I hate to be contrarian.. doesn't matter what you buy, it will fail eventually. but when a drive fails i just swap it with another one, the parity rebuilds itself and i'm good to go.
When it comes to storing files, once you get to the point of making music as a “proper” business, you should be using a RAID 5 (or better) NAS/DAS as backup storage.
These require a small bit of investment as you’ll need a NAS/DAS system and the relevant hard drives (albeit will save you money over the long run). But proper storage of files is absolutely critical once you hit a certain level. It is just a professionalism thing. You can’t be losing files or having downtime because of storage issues
Hey Colt, couple of things to add, don't know with Pro Tools, but with Logic Pro, you need to close your current project if you want to back it up, if still open, the project is locked. Sight... Regarding the tiering backups, you should always keep an offline copy outside of your house (fire, burglary, cyber attack,...). Cyber Attack is still something that could happen to us, what would you do if you end up of having all your data encrypted and asking for a ransoms to decrypt it ? Answer : offline copy. Most likely, if your backup disk connected to your computer, It is compromised too.
Something else to consider is a network storage server with many hard drives. I'm not too familiar with the different raid versions, but there's one that spreads the data across multiple disks in such a way that there's enough redundancy to replace up to 2 failed drives, but you're still able to use more than 50% of the total storage.
Well, I just have gone through it too. I back up from SSD to hard drive and I back up Google Drive automatically. Why not consider cloud simultaneous back up too?
Colt - Another thought just occurred to me... When using RAID-1 (two HDDs, mirrored), you have a very robust storage solution indeed. HOWEVER... Be proactive and have, on hand, at least (1) additional HDD (same type as in your RAID) . This can then be swapped in to your RAID if you ever start to experience storage failures. I keep (2) HDDS on hand just because. It's a fairly expensive contingency but you want to make sure every drive in that usage group is IDENTICAL in storage and performance specs. Oh, and speaking of performance specs, besides RPM (eg, 7200), you want to get the fastest READ/WRITE speeds you can in your HDDs. Big Write-buffer cache is also a must too. These two operating parameters are the most common causes of DAW buffer underflows; your CPU might be sitting around waiting for your storage drives to read or write data streams. For example: transfer a large data file to an HDD (or even SSD) and, after a few seconds, you might see its performance PLUMMET if you exceed its write cache. As per my previous comment, get the best SSD/HDD you can afford for audio production use. Cheers!
Having a proper NAS can simplify these things and can be "set it and forget it", I think.
Do you keep your backup drives connected at all times, just not in use? Or do you only connect them when you're going to back up? I've been leaving my backup drive connected at all times for ease of use, but if that also kills its lifetime faster, then I need to unmount it.
I bought myself a raid years ago when I was collecting movies and tv shows. We didn't have cable and I would add the videos into iTunes, then we would use our Wii wirelessly connecting to my Mac Mini to get access to everything. Kept my iTunes library on the external and we could easily watch whatever we wanted to. It was a 4 disc setup and I think each disc was 2TB bc they had become much cheaper. I was using an eSATA connection from the Mini and had the drives set to RAID 5. Raid 5 needs at least 3 discs and that shares the parity information (the data needed to reconstruct missing data) is spread across all drives. So if you get the flashing red light one day that disc 3 has gone bad, you have a spare identical drive handy and you just remove it and slot the new drive in. The system will recognize the new drive then proceed to rebuild the missing data on the new disc.
It was pretty cool and I wasn't using it for anything truly mission critical, but it made sense. Also had family photos and things like that saved there.
So please forgive me if i missed it but, if time machine missed the backup from your recording/princaple #1 drive & that drive died, didnt the back up drive have most of the stuff on it? I record to ssd & use super duper at the end of my work day to back up to a clone ssd of my primary as well as backup the system drive every few days to another drive. so far so good. 🤞🤞🤞
I’ve lost files before (even with having backup drives) and it is a nightmare. I now work off of SSD, have a backup of all info on a disk drive, and use Backblaze to back up to the cloud every day. I realized God forbid my house ever burn down or get hit by a bad storm I could potentially lose everything I’ve ever worked on in my entire life unless I have everything in the cloud or a drive in another location. Losing those files really got me thinking of how to never ever lose something again. It was terrible.
I love my glyph 16TB raid system! Life saver for sure, but it is almost time for a larger option.
I worked the last 20years, before I retired in computer support and this is good info for everybody! I was always taught that your data isn't safe, unless you have at least 3 backups! On top of that, at least one of those backups need to be off site! Now that I'm retired, I can't afford the off sight backup. My fix for that is to at least store that 3rd copy, in a fire safe box at the outer corner of my garage! This in theory is the safest place for that off chance of a fire! Yes, that solid state drive is good for speed, but not for backup!😁
In a similar boat for years, Colt. Have you used so many different types of drives over the years. Now, with terabytes of Kontakt libraries, etc. etc. Been looking into a NAS/Server set up or an OWC 1UR. Lots of great benefits to hone in 15+ TB into an SSD network solution in a rackmount frame. Been going down the rabbit hole! Great channel, Colt.
I've been using the Samsung T7 for years. I've never had a problem with a single one of them. At this point, I've gone through five of them. Even my oldest ones still work perfectly.
I have 3 of them and I swear by them as well… powerful lil units.
How do you provide a download link? Using a cloud based service or something?
I like the idea of a hard drive dock, i back up to the cloud, and have a dock that holds 2 drives. When i am done for the day i can click a button on the dock and clone my main drive to a backup. Makes the process much easier. You should check it out!
I have had a few hard drives fail, and it cost me an arm and a leg to recover "most" of the data. I was not aware that the SSD was non - recoverable. Thank you for posting this video and information. Having experienced the great pain and agony of losing so many important files, photos, etc., I will be making changes ASAP. Thank You
it is not factual that an ssd cant be recovered have a look on youtube there are plenty of videos showing it can be done and how to do it but it isn't easy, not ALL ssd's can be recoverable tho
I'm having roughly the same problem right now.
I have a RAID1 NAS and always make a system backup of my complete PC on Sunday. But on Saturday the system hard disk broke, luckily I didn't do much during the week, so the loss is not that big.
A heads uo for you guys, you dont always want a faster spinning hard drive.
Disk speeds up to 5600rpm are more than fast enough, the faster the RPM the less stable the drive can become!
There’s also drives readers that can clone from one drive to the next with the push of a button as a cheaper option than a raid system.
Ive been there several times LOL I work off an M.2 NVME drive, back up to an archive HDD drive internally THEN i have 2 of those docks that i backup again to onto sata Enterprise HDD's (they are built tougher and made to run longer). I let go of the RAID i had..it's getting antiquated and there's still a risk of loosing your data if one of the drives fail depending on the RAID type you have. Several of my friends are also backing up to "cloud" so they have an offsite backup, so I'm considering that as well.
I know having a few hard drives is a lot but definitely look into cloud backup as well. Backblaze is what I use (inexpensive and simple) but there are plenty of others. I have main SSD, backup SSD (for in-session backup), backup HDD and Backblaze. Had one scare and haven't taken any risks since and thankful I've been doing this system for a while now!
I use the redundant hard drives plus cloud back up technique. SSD inside the computer handles the session, end of the session I clone it to an external SSD, then back up to the cloud server. Only takes losing files once to whip you into shape real quick!
In addition to that, I have redundant 12 TB spinning drives in a USB dock to dump archive stuff into and duplicate.
Are you dropping and dragging your files to backup or using a software?
Cloud backup service, preferably automated. Learned it the hard way. I keep my system drive rather small - and backup an actual image, so I could just reinstate that to another physical drive and start over. Project files, valuable media and the likes get backups to secondary and tertiary physical drives. If you want it cheaper, you could leave out the cloud and backup to two different drives alternating. But ever since my own dilemma, I follow the 3-2-1 rule. Important stuff in three instances. Two backups - of which one has to be off-site.
I dislike Apple's native services like Time Machine and iCloud. Both can be very clunky and prone to missing data. I also like to know exactly where my files are located. In my workflow I run all my ongoing sessions from my computer hard drive. I keep a consolidated version of the final master on my hard drive for recall and move the full session to a backup when finished. Thankfully I haven't experienced losing a hard drive outright. For proper hard drive care I recommend the following:
1-Where possible only power hard drives when transferring and avoid transferring to and/or from for long hours at a time to avoid overheating
2-Avoid powering on and off in short intervals
3-Always follow proper ejection procedure
4-Avoid operating at extreme high or low temperatures
5-Make sure to use quality cables that are the correct compatibility. Too much or too little power can not only prevent proper performance but also damage the electronics
6-Unplug during electrical storms and power outages to avoid surges
7-Transport carefully and store in a dry, climate controlled location
8-Though sometimes reformatting is recommended, avoid writing and rewriting over the same hard drive multiples time. Much like a phone battery, the stability of a hard drive gets weaker each time a block is erased and rewritten
9-Avoid close proximity to magnets
Thank you for the insight! I always thought I was cheap because my Backup is not SSD. Turns out I’m smart lol
What happened to your backup when you lost the 3 months of work? Did it not work?
Same thing happened to me. What I do is, every artist I work with has their own 256GB drive. I back up to a NAS drive. THIS WORKS and keeps your clients ssd fresh. Hope this helps.
I avoid these type of issues with a Synology NAS doing regular backups...
That’s a great method as well!
I say, quadruplify.
I backup to a cloud service and to platter hard drives. The backup hard drives are again copied to other backup platter hard drives. Not just the data. I also do a full image backup of my computer to two separate hard drives. Redundancy is key, as ssd and platter hard drives WILL crash at some point. It will get spendy, but you'll sleep better.
Interesting, why not Synology NAS?
Setup a multi drive NAS with a RAID array, only one of the hard drives is redundant, if at anytime one HD fails you just put another in and the RAID array rebuilds itself. You can also use SMART to monitor the drives health. This is how we have our company setup (we also backup to an offline server but we're dealing with sensitive data so we really need all the redundancy we can get).
You can use a pre-made solution (Synology is very good, just add drives and configure) or use any old PC with TrueNAS with is free.
Agreed.
Super informative! Thank you so much for this video
I like your recording advice but your IT advice is not good. RAID 1 is OK but it offers no protection against data corruption, fires etc. If you are running a business, you need to have your data backed up to the cloud regularly and automatically. Apple doesn't have any business grade offerings that I'm aware of. It should be something like Amazon S3 or maybe Google Drive. The storage costs are significantly lower than buying hard drives and you won't lose your data.
Would also consider an LTO tape system for on-site backup where 15+ years longevity is needed.
As someone who has recently changed their entire data structure and did a lot of research I can recommend a service called BACKBLAZE. They cost 9$ per month and do automatic cloud backups of all your data, NO DATS LIMIT. With Dropbox, iCloud or Google Drive you have limited storage and it gets really expensive if you store lots of data over the years. I currently have 7,5 TB of data backed up and on two hard drives locally and still only pay the 9$. If your hard drives die, get stolen or your house burns down, Backblaze send you a hard drive with all your stuff so you don't even have to download terrabytes over terrabytes. If you send the hard drive back after copying the data again, they even refund you for the hard drive they sent you. It's cheap, it's straight to the point and no bullshit...can only recommend their service!
@scottakam Haven’t lost a project in 150 major label projects and my backup scheme has been called impeccable so agree to disagree. Best of luck though! Lots of ways to protect data better than all my 2” days. And Exabytes.
The days of unlimited Google Drive are gone, and the only way more space is to add more users. This is cost prohibitive for a lot of small business. I was given about a month to move about 50TB or lose it.
100% agreed!
You said at the start that you were using Time Machine on Apple to create a backup of your main hard drive but didn't explain why that failed. Shouldn't' the sessions have been recoverable from that?
A few things:
HARD DRIVES SOLD IN ENCLOSURES WILL INVARIABLY OVERHEAT AND FAIL.
You hope it’s the controller card first, and in time enough for you ‘shuck’ and put the HDD in a fanned enclosure.
I built a little 2 2” fan stand that blows through the vents while I transfer data onto newly-purchased ELEMENT or PASSPORT drive-makes a 10-20° difference. Then I remove the casing [voids warranty-but if you can use the same fan stand technique until the warranty expires, go for it] and into a new fanned enclosure it goes.
USE A SERVER_GRADE HDD. Mount in a fanned enclosure. Using them for years, no failures yet.
BACK UP AND TURN OFF THE BACK UP. Seems like a simple thing, but keep the mileage down.
GET A HDD HEALTH MONITORING SYSTEM like Hard Disk Sentinel. Gives temperature [current and lifetime] and health of the drive and hours remaining.
Disk HDDs come in three speeds, 5600, 7200, and 10,000. Speed effects latency but also noise and wear life (heat, etc). Latency isn't really an issue for basic back up tasks in the background. However, I agree, 7200 is the best choice. 10,000 is considerably quicker but disk life is affected and again, as a backup drive, the latency isn't really an issue to pay so much extra for.
RAID 10 with physical HDD. I've seen music producers insist on getting SDDs for their zero noise benefit. Get 4 drives and set them up in a RAID 10, route your audio gear to another room, or put the drives in a RAID enclosure and put the enclosure in another room for zero noise. Mine are in a water cooled enclosure and noise is pretty much nil. WD Black drives are pretty quiet.
7:48 I strongly advise against these docks, I used them for a long time and they tend to destroy the connections and create writing errors. I almost lost 2 discs like that. I used Icybox, never again for me.... I copy on several SSDs + a backup on an online solution...
The best way that I use in my studio is a synology network backup with seagate iron wolf drives when it senses a drive going bad it instantly takes the data off of it and you don’t loose information I have 32 terabytes but I’m upgrading to 48 terabytes with 20 gig fiber connection to my whole studio even my Mac laptop backs up to it wirelessly but my whole network is ubiquity pro and tons of Dante preamps and digital audio labs headphone system my latency is 186 micro seconds not milliseconds it’s faster than a guitar cable lol
Backing up isn't just to protect against hardware failures, it's also good in case of a virus/malware infection!
A fellow musician friend of mine just infected his computer this past weekend and doesn't have a full image backup of his computer. Gonna be a major pain to reinstall Windows, then his apps, the his plugins...THEN reactivate all his licenses.
This is interesting. So far, I´ve had 4 SSD´S working as sample library and project drives with no issues and still have the 4 HHD drives they replaced. The HHD spinners all failed at some point and were reformatted to be usable.. However, I may buy a new one just to store duplicates of my projects and system. Thanks...good vid!
Having physical backups is important but honestly, services like Backblaze are SO cheap for the piece of mind they provide that its kinda crazy not to use one. Its like $100 a year to backup a computer and every harddrive hooked up to it. Constantly updating, AND versioning. Great to count on your own backup system, but this is a good insurance policy.
25 years of PT data. after a few traumatic catastrophes, i've settled on a 94T synology raid, backblaze™, 25 gig bluray disc burns after each project completes, and redundant data on 2 PT rigs (studio & home).
What are you using to send download links of songs to clients?
I still have a demo on cassete tape.. and it still pays butefully.... lost almost all my work hard drives are a no-no... Still have one demo. on a cd but since its scratch i cannot listen to it. The rest is all lost... the only exception is my cd's sent by mail whit the stamps whit rhe date on hit but there are sealed for my composing rigths. Obiously I connot open them. These sould be ok.
If you're business or livelihood is dependent on file storage, set up a RAID on NAS, running on a virtually free old junk PC (from 10 years ago). Software to run RAID/NAS like TruNas or OMV are free. Also don't backup once every 3 days. Let it sync every hour. All hard drive will fail, eventually.
Wait, you had time machine backups, so why did you have to go right to data recovery? What happened to the backups?
Givern that SSD's have a limited lifespan, in terms of number of write operations.... I only use them for content I will primarily be reading only... so sample librariies.
For recording audio, I still use "old" mechanical platter drives (7200 ).
But to Colt's point, you should ideally be backing up everything anyhow, be dilligent, irrespective of drive "type"... and ideally offsite/clouid-based.. . as a final safety net
Manage risk :)
I don't get it, you said you had a backup drive - they both got broken at the same time?
Congrats on the new room! Can't wait to hear and see what ya got going on! Keep the videos coming brother.
Thanks so much!
For decades my motto and law has been... "It's time to backup whenever you've done more work than you care to redo".
I've been running a separate server computer since the mid 1990's (reveals my old age lol). My current one uses multiple 10,000 RPM mechanical drives with RAID, redundant LAN ports, redundant power supplies and redundant battery backups. I copy my DAW workstation files to its own separate external HDD's (yes, two of them), then to the server. I frequently copy completed client folders to client supplied memory sticks too. I know it's overkill but one can't be too careful.
I remember the old days of the popular but unreliable "Colorado Tape Drives" and was burned by them too many times to continue using them. Once optical drives came out I'd burn project folders to DVD's but those would fail too. Today's inexpensive external drive chassis and pocket drives have made backups a lot more reliable. It's a good time to be in both music and tech. But... you must remember to backup. And if using backup software, it's important to let it verify your backups too.
I wanted to share my solution for backups. I have 2 m.2 ssds in my PC, 1 for OS/DAW/Plugins (Western Digital Black) and 1 for Audio/Sample (Samsung 990). The whole Audio/Sample Drive is backed up to the cloud (Microsoft OneDrive) and backs up as I work. If I'm on the road I work off my external m.2 ssd (Samsung 990) in a fancy enclosure (Asus ROG Arion), at the end of the session the whole protools session folder gets uploaded to the cloud (Microsoft OneDrive for me) and shared with the client. At the same time, the session downloads to my PC. This gives me a working drive (external ssd), a physical backup (my PC), a cloud backup and potentially an off-site backup (client download). Due to paranoia, I do also have an archive m.2 ssd drive, that is also backed up to the cloud (Google Drive).
What’s a trust hard drive that you recomend?
100% have a copy on the cloud. There are many options out there. Then have 1 copy on a 4-Bay Raid, not 2-Bay, because it will make it easier to expand later down the line.
I remember this story from your previous video; thank you so much for the advice to not use SSDs as backup drives. :D It helped me tremendously. HDD all the way for me. Also, the docking stations look really convenient!
The best rule is the 3-2-1 rule.
Maintain 3 copies of your data: This includes the original data and at least two copies.
Use 2 different types of media for storage: Store your data on two distinct forms of media to enhance redundancy.
Keep at least 1 copy off-site: To ensure data safety, have one backup copy stored in an off-site location, separate from your primary data and on-site backups.
Drive 1 - is my primary daily driver (SSD / NVME)
Drive 2 - is a backed up copy of my projects folder to another physical drive on my server (7200rpm spinning disc)
Drive 3 - Daily Cloud Backups to my cloud provider
I had my hard drive crash really early on after getting my digital console in 2004.. 2 years of recordings and jams etc. Lost all confidence in all gear and felt like I knew nothing. Clients called me unprofessional , didn't record anyone again for years.
Clarity.. IDE HDD were the worst.
M.Disc… If it’s done/completed/finished, just write it to a Millenium disc. Easier to store and read, forever, without fail-capable moving or electronic parts. Second best option after magnetic stripe. Just store it in a fail-safe, fire/heat resistant storage (just as HDD or SSD). Cheers.
If a session doesn’t exist in 3 places then it doesn’t exist.
YUp we all learn the HARD way. Since i had that happen to me 12 years ago & now run all EXTERNAL "SAMSUNG T7 SSD Drive for #1Audio/ Projects, #2 Sound LIBRARY, #3 Video/PIcs for MOVIE's YT. Plus 2 8TB EXT. HHD ( CLONED ) for Archives BACK UP PROJECTS & all other SSD's. then of course TIME MACHINE Ext. HD
Buy a NAS for backups. This way, you can be sure that you will no longer have USB problems. And you no longer have to be physically at the disk/USB dock when you are away from home.
If someone else has commented but forgive me. The first thing is to define a recovery time objective rto and then a recovery point objective rpo. I would also suggest the biggest risk these days would be malware and ransomware. It could cause the client to lose ip intellectual property over their work
Linus Tech Tips has some excellent videos on how you should do file backups. Highly recommend looking into their videos
Hey Colt,
Man that’s an awful thing to go through. Thanks for the video. I just replace my five year old internal drive in my iMac to a Crucial 2TB SSD and backup to two outboard LACIE drives as well (7200rpm) I’m interested in replacing those with that raid system.
Blessings,
Jamie 🙏🏼💛
try BackBlaze
Shoutout to you doing the right thing by your clients. But this video is scary. I have 3 external hard drives oh no
Thank you so much for this share my former fellow Peorian Brother from another Mother! I was actually recently exploring a wireless NAS system to implement in my backup ecosystem. Great content! "Keep Doing That Voodoo That You Do!" 👊😉
Whatever you do, please don't use RAID 5. I personally use RAIDZ3. It takes at least 5 disks to function as intended, but I can have up to 3 disks fail without data loss, and disk failure during resilvering (data restoration) is a valid concern since the disks are working much harder.
Not to be that guy, but I had a raid that was incorrectly connected to each bay in manufacture. Everything was fine till a drive failed and the software wanted a blank drive. Then it simply mangled all the data over all the drives as it was incorrectly spanning. Killed the lot. If you have a lot of data tape is still king.
Why don’t you have a synology nas or QNAP.
Dude I was wondering what the hell you were doing… I’ve been using a NAS with network drive since 2017….. everyone who was using HDDs in since 2000s knows these disks always fail….fast forward 7 years I have been using my Synology 1815+ I have 72 Terabytes at this point. And that entire NAS is backed up with Amazon.
That' the reason why you should record on server with RAID;.. If one HDD fails, you have not one but 2 back-up on 2 drives...
Yeah a portable NAS system comes in handy.
Use Asustor NAS systems
Synology Nas over here
The only drives I ever lost in 30 years are WD Drives. Let that sink in.
The issue with a NAS(raid Box) is that the NAS box itself can go bad I had a Netgear NAS one that used for 9 years one day it stoped working. Nothing wrong with the hard drives it was the NAS itself. Guess what? I could not take those hard drives out and use them because the Netgear used something proprietary on the hard drives making good hard drives useless unless I want to reformat them on another system and use them again. I would say you need 2 NAS (raid boxes)
I had a problem like that with a customer once too, and if its a more advanced RAID even data recovery labs are going to struggle getting that back. Some of the newer NAS units have cloud backup ability, that's where its at, just have to periodically monitor. Always have to make sure there isn't any singular failure point that can hose you. Cloud backups can take a while, but if the NAS is doing it time isn't as much of a factor.
Been There … Done That ! 15 years ago The Same thing Happened to Me and lost $4500 of clients music ! I back up times 4 Since Then. !!
Colt, you should get a NAS. It's a game changer.
I might do that at some point, but for now the solution works great for me
I agree you need a NAS. It's the best solution. You could have what ever setup you want but use the NAS to backup your system in real-time.
What on earth??? who only relies on one or two hard drives in a pro studio? at the end of each day, ALL my data is in a MINIMUM of three places. And I always take at least one of those drives home so that all my data is in a minimum of two separate physical places.
ALWAYS have backups
ALWAYS
2 Backups plus the originals
1 of those should be off-site
The health of harddrives is monitored. The health of cheap SSD's is not. Soooo, for storage on long term... when you put them in a drawer, harddrives are better. A damaged harddrive, connected over USB usually shortly comes to life so you can save the data.
Commercially you need a raid array. So it comes on line every evening so all is backed up.
backblaze is an amazing cloud-based back up system. backups up automatically continuously
This could make you turn into Colt Kinason
I had my 2TB kontakt SSD hard drive break like two weeks ago, what a f*cking nightmare
true
🤣🤣Mine unmounted just yesterday while am bzy making beats to send to an artist..... I recovered the data thru with other software en transferred it all to a new external hard drive jxt finished right now took 10hrs
Every HDD and SSD will fail at some point. You need at least 3 copies of everything. 1 should definitely be cold storage.