Back up

Summer is almost over and as good a time as any to back up your important data. Hard drives are very cheap these days, but they also seem to fill up faster. I just bought a 250 GB Seagate drive with a Firewire/USB2 case for $95 and I know I could have gotten an even better deal if I shopped around, but I am very happy with it still. This drive is going to be used to back up my sample library, Pro Tools sessions and FL Studio projects. The really important stuff is also going to be burned to DVDs as well. I only trust Taiyo Yuden discs from Blankmedia.ca.

” TAIYO YUDEN Recordable DVD Media is the best of the best. Used by professionals for mastering around the world, Japanese-made Taiyo Yuden is made by the inventor of the CD-R disc. Taiyo Yuden has the widest playback compatibility, the lowest error rates in recording, and comes with a 100-year data integrity guarantee.”

Remember that when you are backing up your data, that you want make sure the backup on a different drive, not just on a different partition, if the drive fails, its all gone.

Always remove external hard disks or flash media properly.

In Windows: left click on the safely remove hardware icon in the notification bar (bottom right corner). Then click on the device name to remove it. A balloon tip will indicate it has been removed properly. You can then turn off and physically remove it from the system. If it says it cannot be stopped or ejected, then exit all programs and try again.

In OSX: Don’t just drag the disk icon to the recycle bin icon to remove it, use Disk Utility to remove the drive, I’ve seen a couple of drives get corrupted by not doing this right. In disk utility you select the drive you want to remove, and push eject from the options across the top. You can unmount the volume first if you want, but I have not seen it make a difference.

If you have Pro Tools running you must first unmount the disk from the workspace [option/alt ;]. Select the drive letter, go to the toolbox icon and unmount. Then follow the above removal instructions. Some other DAWs are like this as well.

What are you waiting for? Back it up!