Protecting your digital masters
A finished master recording can be the culmination of years worth of work, so don’t throw all of that time and effort away by losing your files! That’s where the 3-2-1 backup strategy comes in, and it’s something I recommend for all songwriters, and especially anyone operating a professional production studio.
What’s the 3-2-1 backup strategy?
The 3-2-1 backup strategy advises you keep three copies of your data at all times. Two of those copies are stored on different types of media on-site, and a third copy is kept off-site.
This can sound a little daunting to implement, but modern tech has made this convenient and affordable.
Here’s how I do it for my own mastering studio business at the pro level, and how to apply these same concepts if you’re a songwriter working from home.
My mastering studio backup strategy
I keep a studio archive on an external hard drive, and all studio projects that have been inactive for more than 6 months are moved over to this external archive drive.
Apple’s Time Machine backup software maintains an automated onsite backup on a second external hard drive, of both my computer’s internal hard drive, and my external studio archive drive. This ensures that my currently active studio projects, and my older archived projects are all backed up regularly and automatically.
My main computer’s internal hard drive and my studio’s external archive drive are also backed up automatically to a remote off-site location using BackBlaze, a cloud backup service that’s encrypted, secure, and affordable.
How I implement 3-2-1 backups in my studio
There’s 3 copies made of all data:
A copy on either my main computer’s internal drive or the external studio archive drive.
A second copy as a Time Machine backup of everything.
A third copy in the offsite BackBlaze backup cloud service, also of everything. This protects the data from any local natural disasters that could affect my onsite backups.
At least 2 different forms of media contain the data (in my case, 3):
one internal hard drive.
two different external hard drives.
a mixture of SSDs and spinning discs for the offsite cloud backups inside the Blackblaze remote datacenters.
Costs
Thankfully, gone are the days where you’d need to maintain an expensive and noisy server array at home to do all of this. The costs for those hard drive arrays range between $500-$2000+.
Here’s the costs for my simpler studio backup system (all prices current at time of writing, and memory/storage prices change often):
2TB Samsung T7 portable SSD hard drives x2: $300
BackBlaze Single User Personal Backup: $99/year (about $8/month)
Setup
This can take a little time to set up, but once that’s done it all just works in the background. The setup process is pretty convenient and streamlined for Time Machine and BackBlaze.
It took me about 30 minutes to set this whole system up initially for my own studio, and I haven’t really had to touch it since.
A dedicated external storage array that you run onsite can be much more complex to set up and manage, and can get a lot more technical with command-line prompts and things like that. They’re super annoying.
Applications for artists and songwriters
Set up an automated backup and archiving system for your studio computer. Don’t lose your work!
For an artist who needs to back up just your own stuff, you can probably get away with having less total storage available, and save even more money. Here’s the budget for that:
1TB Samsung T7 portable SSD hard drives x2: $200 ($99 each)
BackBlaze Single User Personal Backup: $99/year (about $8/month)
So, that’s about $210 for two backup hard drives plus your first month of the Backblaze cloud backup service. Pretty fair price to protect the work you’ve spent years writing and recording.
How to make a secure backup of your digital master recordings
When you get the digital masters of your finished work back from your mastering engineer, upload them to your digital distribution service to get them on the various streaming music platforms. Then, copy the master files over to your external studio archive drive.
Make sure you’ve set up BackBlaze to automatically back up both your computer’s main hard drive, and your external studio archive drive offsite to the cloud.
What about archiving physical media?
It’s also important to keep archives of your physical masters. These are the metal stampers that are used to press copies of your record during vinyl record production.
Don’t just leave these in the hands of your vinyl pressing provider! You paid for them, so you own them.
We’ll go over more about physical media archiving, next time in this series.
