Recording Tip 16: “If you’re not backed up twice, you’re not backed up.”-Dan Cleary And use a proper backup program

That's an old adage my buddy Dan Cleary used to say, and I think he's right. Now I may get some pushback here, but hey....it’s your project. If you're not a backup kind of guy or gal, then roll the dice. But one you experience that awful feeling I call "THE PAIN" where you realize you're fully screwed as you've lost one of your projects or songs then that's usually enough to change your mind about not backing up regularly.

It’s a bit of a pain, but one really needs to have two backups, somewhat depending upon what you stage of the project you’re in, and what your backups are. The battle of backup formats by the major labels has mostly been settled. For a while it was the AIT tapes (resembled 8mm videocasettes) and using Retrospect software. Too bad because there was another backup program which was much better. It knew how to read PT or DP and save only changes on any and every drive, but they went under. But now that’s all gone. All you need is readable media.

I use Synchronize! Pro X and find it works great. However, always double or triple check things if data is going to be deleted before hitting the button of no return! I’ll have a work drive and usually two drives that I backup to, which are all clones of what I’m working on.

These days labels mostly required you turn in copies of the mixes and digital sessions on two different media formats, normally a hard drive and DVDs. They don’t care about the backup program and that’s good. Better just to have duplicates which can hopefully be read by whatever system is in place twenty years from now.

To be honest I doubt it’ll happen...things are moving so fast. At least we’re required to turn in .wav files of the master multitracks. But really now....raise your hands if you believe any software in twenty years from now will even be able to play what we worked so hard to create?

Ce la vie....We’ll just do what we can for now and hopefully if something is needed they’ll be some old fart with a garage of computers with various OS and DAW systems to playback our file!