Hello everyone!

I thought I would mention a few things that need to be said even though they're rule #1 for anyone who does work on their computer. But, let me just emphasize for dramatic effect:

Always always always *twenty minutes later* always always back up your work. Even if you're in the middle of working.

I'll try to sum it up in a bit of point form:


  • Save as a new file name every now and then just in case you accidentally save over your main project file. The reason is, if your computer crashes, or you lose power, or if the file becomes corrupt for whatever reason, you don't lose your project. I wrote an Impulse Tracker song a year ago and nearly lost it because I saved over top of it. This wouldn't have happened had I saved this file multiple times in different areas. (For those who are curious, I did manage to bring the file back using file recovery software. It corrupted the title info but luckily the notation was still good. I just had to re-import the samples. Let's just say I got very lucky.)
  • When the project is complete, always back your work up. (Yes, even the mixed down music). It's nice that it's in your local hard drive, but we live in a day in age of cloud storage, the likes of Google Drive and OneDrive. Very convenient! You may be worried about your privacy though, with good reason. But you can still save your work to DVDs, or external storage like Flash drives. This is great for archiving your work for years from now if you ever want to come back to it. This leads me to my next tip:
  • Back up your backups! Magnetic Hard Drives with heads are fragile. Nothing's more terrifying to me than when someone knocks over my external drive. Hard drives have moving parts and therefore are sensitive. Thumb drives fail. DVDs fail. Flash media like SD cards or CF cards. They all fail. Always back up your backups. Here's a great article on the average lifespans of digital media.


I know this goes without saying but one of the reasons I still have some of my old Impulse and Scream Tracker files from back in the 90's is because I've archived them on multiple drives. smile

I hope this has helped some people!

Last edited by Mat - PG Music; 10/05/16 10:50 AM.
Thanks,

Mathew
PG Music Inc.