Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Redundancy at it's Best

I survived many internships over the coarse of the years and have taken away many good habits and learned a good deal, but one of the best habits I garnered was the importance of backing up your work. Part of my duties when interning with the Souldiggaz, a production group, was to back up the hard drives of the recording rooms onto DVD. They kept a meticulous record of what was backed up and where. They had CD books filled to the brim with DVDs that were carefully labeled and verified. In my house I keep a smaller version of my own recordings and session backups.
Over the years I have witness the horror of a hard drive crashing and the person freaking out because they didn't back up their drives regularly. My girlfriend was a victim of not backing up and almost lost a whole year (2 full semesters) of writings for her graduate studies. She was very lucky that I could recover the majority of her hard drive. If I wasn't able to achieve that small miracle she would have had to spend upwards of five hundred dollars to have a service recover the drive or potentially loose all of her work and start over. For myself I have been contacted by old clients that needed backups of old sessions or wanted to revisit old sessions that they didn't back up themselves. It's painful enough to loose your personal work but it's crippling to misplace clients work over a hard drive failure.
I came across a great article that emphasizes the art of the backup that I felt would help make this point and maybe prevent someone from making a simple mistake that could be avoided.