KVR Audio

jezzy · Post by **jezzy** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 9:54 am

What do you need to do to back up your songs in Windows to transfer to another PC or to reinstall after formating your harddrive

Regards,
Jezzy

Kriminal · Post by **Kriminal** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 10:02 am

A CD or DVD burner, burning sofware and blank discs.

CypherOne · Post by **CypherOne** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 10:05 am

what he said.

kara · Post by **kara** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 10:06 am

I agree, I burn it all on CD's

jezzy · Post by **jezzy** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 10:07 am

Any suggestions on how to back up presets, banks patches etc. so that a song can be played on another computer?

Regards,
Jezzy

Kriminal · Post by **Kriminal** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 10:14 am

Yes, keep them all in the same place on both PC's. ie keep the same paths.

C:/Programs/Cubarse/Songs/Presets or whatever you have...

That way, when a song opens, it looks in the same place and the filesd should be there.

flametop · Post by **flametop** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 10:27 am

One thing to note with SX or Nuendo is that you can prepare the audio pool for archiving. This ensures all the snippets of audio and edits get included in the project directory.

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 12:03 pm

Presets will be automatically saved within your songfile, unless you're using plugins not offering "save-with-host-songfile" functionality.
Reaktor still doesn't do so, from what it seems, so you'd have to save the patch into your songfolder first.
Samples used need to be transported as well, most sample based plugins offer some "save preset with samples" functions.
And finally all audiofiles that you imported from "somewhere" would have to be copied as well, usually hosts are offering some sort of "consolidation" feature.

Needless to say that the "target" computer will have to have all the required plugins installed as well. For freebies it's no problem to sort out which ones have been used and copy the DLLs, for commercial ones you'll have to reinstall things on the target machine as well. In case that's not possible I'd bounce down everything to audiofiles.

After all, when I backup things I save EVERYTHING used in my song folder.

handy · Post by **handy** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 12:03 pm

Kriminal wrote:Yes, keep them all in the same place on both PC's. ie keep the same paths.

C:/Programs/Cubarse/Songs/Presets or whatever you have...

That way, when a song opens, it looks in the same place and the filesd should be there.

Actually I know its easy to say "CD burner" and leave it at that, but I think Kriminal's point is worth dealing with. I just spent a few unhappy hours searching for "stab2.wav" on my ancient WIn98 PC. I use ACID and REASON, both of which have a good way of saving a song complete with all its constituent wavs, which in theory renders Kriminal's advice redundant. However, in practice I somehow managed to transfer a saved file that only referenced the files on my old PC. I even thought that I checked each song when I transferred them a few years ago, but I clearly didn't.

On the same lines you also have to worry about your VSTI path routes. Some of my old ACID songs used a rather good freebie reverb that I now can't find or deleted at some point. This is one problem that REASON doesn't have, and a good argument in favour of its limited palatte. In theory, of course, my host should rescan directories and find the VST's, but in light of the above problems I have never been 100% confident in my archiving system. What happens in 2008 - will Windows LONGHORN-XP still run my ancient ACID pro2 files. You see? Its not as easy as it first seems I think.

I have considered investing some time into old songs and rendering all sections to wav, as this is likely to remain a good long term standard.

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 12:09 pm

As said, there's close to no need for backing up preset files in case you only want to transfer one single song as the songfile will contain the settings.
In case you're changing computers completely you will of course have to backup everything - but that's quite another story.

Kriminal · Post by **Kriminal** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 12:15 pm

I thought he meant folders full of preset banks and stuff

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 12:37 pm

Oh... I overlooked that he indeed wants to backup his complete PC.

Personally, I have two places to save presets in.
A) Logics plugin settings folder, in case the plugin doesn't offer own preset saving strategies.
B) "My documents" in which I save all "preset only" things (read: no sample data). "My documents" over here isn't placed on C: btw. I have it on E: where I save all non-audio data
C) Certain presets can be found doubled on drive G:, these are the presets for sample based instruments, but I actually don't use them but copy the ones from "My documents" more or less regularly, just to make sure to keep together what belongs together (i.e. instrument definition files and samples).

On a system backup I need to backup this:
- Entire partition E: because that's containing presets, word docs, whatever... all my non-audio data.
- Certain program folders, especially my Logic, Cubase and WaveLab folders because these are well structured, containing VST DLLs, autoload songs and whatever. When done with reinstalling I just overwrite the installed folders with the ones I have backed up.
- Entire partition G: which is my sample drive.
- Entire partitions H: and I: which are my audio drives.
- Entire partition J: which is my "downloads" drive.

I used to backup everything on CDs, but now I'm usually using a mobile USB drive caddy, containing a 160GB Maxtor, formatted with Fat32 (readable by XP, 98SE and OSX). Alternatively I might just transfer things to another PC via my small home network.

I do of course do a lot of interim backups as well, to keep things clean and to not run into any risk of losing important data.

t-willy · Post by **t-willy** » Mon Jul 19, 2004 12:39 pm

jezzy wrote:What do you need to do to back up your songs in Windows to transfer to another PC or to reinstall after formating your harddrive

Regards,
Jezzy

an external hard drive

lates

t-willy

BONES · Post by **BONES** » Tue Jul 20, 2004 2:27 am

My workstation has a system drive and two other drives in RAID-0. C:\ and G:\ drives occupy the system disc and D:\, E:\ and F:\ drives occupy the RAID. All my applications live on D:\ and my musical data [songs, presets, samples, etc] live on E:\. Every week I copy everything from E:\ to G:\ as an easy backup and three or four times a year I burn selected stuff, mostly songs, presets and plugin folders, to a couple of CD's. One CD stays at my place, the other goes to SiK's so if my house burned down, we'd only lose a small amount of work. I also have most of it on my computer at work so there are probably 3 physical locations for backup. So far it's only been useful once, when the RAID shit itself but it was well worth the time I spend making sure it's all OK.

How Do You Back Up Your Songs?