# Best Sync Backup for Windows?



## merlinhimself (Sep 3, 2019)

Had a terrible night last night. I went to delete my One Drive from my PC, not knowing that it would also delete the entirety of my documents folder, which housed all my cubase projects :|

Luckily had sent a few .cpr files to a guitarist for tempo and reference but still lost all my audio in the sessions etc. I dont want to get into how much I hate microsoft right now lol

Anyways, does any one reccomend any backup programs, clouds, or general setups that are secure and solid?

I want to get on this asap. I was dumb for not doing it right away


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## DavidY (Sep 3, 2019)

If the files had actually synced to your Onedrive (and I guess it may have happened without you knowing) I seem to remember Onedrive has some sort of Recycle Bin - just in case you've not been online to your Onedrive account to check that. 

I know Onedrive changed recently to try to include your Documents folder (and some others).

But yes, backup is good and I for one don't backup as often as I should. I use Macrium Reflect Free when I do make backups though.


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## vitocorleone123 (Sep 6, 2019)

I use Arq for hourly backups to the cloud of key files and Macrium Reflect Home full for full/differential/incremental backups of a regular basis (incremental is daily if not doing one of the others on the schedule I set).


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## vitocorleone123 (Sep 6, 2019)

Investing in good redundant backup is key, especially when you spend thousands on instruments and hours of blood sweat tears and joy on creating music. Or photos. Or anything you dont want to risk losing.


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## merlinhimself (Sep 8, 2019)

vitocorleone123 said:


> Investing in good redundant backup is key, especially when you spend thousands on instruments and hours of blood sweat tears and joy on creating music. Or photos. Or anything you dont want to risk losing.



Totally, I ended up going with MiniTools Shadowmaker and its doing great, dont have to do anything since I set it up, a few others I tried out were kind of dumb. I kept having to manually start the backup. But yeah, definitely should have been the first thing I set up. The show I work on came a week earlier than I was anticipating, I was in the middle of building a new rig, got everything up and running and started writing right away thinking Id finish the rest of my setup after the first episode lol. Whoops.


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## Ivan M. (Sep 18, 2019)

Does this software backup your data in some standard format? If the software stops working eventually, are you able to extract files from backups manually?


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## merlinhimself (Sep 18, 2019)

Ivan M. said:


> Does this software backup your data in some standard format? If the software stops working eventually, are you able to extract files from backups manually?


Yeah that was the main reason I picked shadowmaker, it backs up the files themselves. I tried a few others and didn't like the ones like youre talking about


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## tack (Sep 18, 2019)

merlinhimself said:


> Anyways, does any one reccomend any backup programs, clouds, or general setups that are secure and solid?


My strategy is to use Syncthing to do realtime syncs of project (and other selected) folders from my desktops to my NAS with versioning, and then I do daily backups from my NAS to the cloud.

The solution I use for snapshots to cloud is quite nerdy (as I demand certain features that aren't easily come by) so I won't get into it, but I just wanted to plug Syncthing which is a super handy tool.


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## Shad0wLandsUK (Sep 19, 2019)

merlinhimself said:


> Yeah that was the main reason I picked shadowmaker, it backs up the files themselves. I tried a few others and didn't like the ones like youre talking about


I am curious to know if you have tried out VEEAM client for Windows?

Thanks


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## Ivan M. (Sep 19, 2019)

I'm using FreeFileSync, it's an excellent piece of software for file syncing


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## Fredeke (Oct 18, 2019)

My solution for backups is rather geeky, but here it is: copy one drive onto another, with the option to only overwrite files that have a more recent date (that is, those that have been edited since the last copy).

There are several ways to do that. I used to use Total Commander (it has a nice Synchronize option, and its mere Copy version is already quite handy), but the problem is it sometimes stopped to prompt me about some minor issue, so I couldn't just leave it alone and go to bed. Now I use Roadkill Unstoppable Copier: not a backup util, just a powerful copy utility with lots of options too. And it's free.

This method works best if you're well organized, and don't move files around too much. When I save a file, I save it directly where it should be, and I rarely move it afterwards, so cloning folder trees is a good backup method for me.

Also, this method doesn't keep track of history. But it works well when you save different versions of a project under incremented names, for example, like I do.

Just my 2 cents.


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## thomasjdev (Oct 18, 2019)

I’ve been using Backblaze for my continuous backup and have been pleased with it. Not terribly expensive given what it protects. It even backs up my external usb sample drives.

It may not be realistic to ever restore my sample folder but I have the option for them to ship me a drive with my data if I ever needed it. 

As of now I have just over 2tb of stuff backed up.


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## JohnG (Oct 18, 2019)

A dual strategy makes sense to me:

1. very frequent backups for project files, to a local drive _and_ remotely;

2. then, at least "periodically" (weekly? daily? monthly?) back up _everything_ to a remote location in case of some catastrophe at the studio (fire, I would guess most likely concern).

Services like Backblaze might be ideal for the "small but frequent" backups (like DAW sequences and even audio if the projects aren't huge), then something clumsier but easier to restore in bulk would be ok (like direct copy of sample drives to an extra drive) for the second category.


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## mducharme (Oct 19, 2019)

I have a triple strategy:

1. I work on all files in Dropbox, and since that backs up each time I hit save and I can recover any version from any time I pressed save, I use that for versioning too.
2. Backblaze acts as a second line of defense, backing up everything on a regular basis, so I get backups of files about every hour or so, so even if my dropbox went kaput, I should lose no more than an hour of work.
3. StorageCraft ShadowProtect is my third line of defense and this does image backups to removable storage, incremental every night and full once a week. I have already had to use this once when my Windows install got totally broken and I booted from the recovery CD, recovered from the image backup on my bootable drive, and was up and running again in a matter of hours. The nice thing about ShadowProtect is that you can even recover to different hardware, so suppose your motherboard dies and you have to get a new one and the system is no longer bootable because the drivers are wrong and you get BSOD on boot - you can use ShadowProtect to swap out those drivers for the correct ones and actually restore your image backup on the different hardware. You can also restore individual files from the image backups if you need instead of restoring the entire image.

The only thing I don't do is have Backblaze back up my ShadowProtect backups - those are too large and would result in Backblaze uploading at full blast constantly, so I exclude those. What that basically means is that if I somehow lost my main drive and the backup drive at the same time, I can't restore an image backup and would have to reinstall the system and software and restore files from Backblaze. Later I might get another external drive that I can swap out from time to time just in case.


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## Henu (Oct 22, 2019)

Fredeke said:


> My solution for backups is rather geeky



robocopy "_SOURCE_DIRECTORY_" "_DESTINATION_DIRECTORY_" /MIR /FFT /A-:SH

Save as .bat and double-click: First time it creates an exact clone of your source directory, the next times use it every time you want to mirror all the changes in your source folder to your backup folder.


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