My new mantra: SABU SABU SABU

How many times have you enjoyed the smug satisfaction of reminding somebody who you’ve just caught screaming unmentionables at the blue screen of death about the importance of regularly backing up and saving work?

I’m religious about this and keep multiple copies of finished .wav, .mp3, .psd and .jpg files on my iMac, MacBook Pro, Drobo and iDisk. They’re also copied to my office network which in turn is backed up to offsite data centres in the UK and Germany. Pretty well covered then. You’d think.

But one important word in the paragraph above may not have escaped your attention: “finished”.

Work in progress is loaded as I edit from my iDisk directory – “in the cloud” (I hate that term almost as much as AJAX, Web 2.0, “loving it” and “I’m good, thanks”). Anyway, the reason I save work in progress here is to avoid copying and pasting to USB flash drives which usually means I have the wrong version of the file or worse still, I the one I intended to keep).

iDisk seems to offer a perfect solution. A single version of my work in progress which I can access anywhere. I fasten the Steinberg USB key to my key fob and if I’ve a spare twenty minutes after work, hey presto. I just fire up Cubase and carry on with that mix. And that spontaneity always yields the best results. Fifteen minutes in the right mood (and who knows when that will happen) will prove a hundred times more fruitful than the three hours that I’ve set aside to compose at the weekend.

I was gutted this evening when a particularly happy hour was destroyed because Cubase crashed as I was working on a file from iDisk which hadn’t had experienced the gentle caress of Time Machine.

There’s the problem. I don’t have Time Machine configured to back up iDisk (to be honest, I’ve not even checked to see if that’s possible).

I’ve paid a high price for convenience tonight but at least I have a new mantra to set to music:

Save and Back Up
Save and Back Up
Save and Back Up

And when you’ve done it three times, do it once again (just to be on the safe side). Scary stuff.

Tags: back up, file storage, iDisk, Time Machine