Seeing as they haven’t delivered anything yet despite promises, some criticism surely is justified?
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I’m using my Digitakt this morning and loving it! Stoked for OB!
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But saying backup wasnt promised so it shouldnt be expected is pretty extreme for a digital instrument that was designed and heavily promoted as a tool to sample live. I certainly dont remember anyone demoing it saying sampling should be done on an external device and backed up first, if I had I would not have been interested in buying it in the first place as it kills the workflow.
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My issue isn’t with the Elektron developers or engineers, it’s with marketing. The last year has been a failure in terms of overpromising and under delivering. That’s an issue of improperly managing expectations, false advertising, and poor communication. Some might call it a growing pain, but I hope that Elektron marketing takes a lesson from this and advertises what it can deliver, when it can deliver it instead of overcommitting and then putting undue pressure on developers to meet their unrealistic expectations.
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I will because I don’t need Overbridge or ever intend to use it 
(well I might try the standalone version if it materialises, but just for project management/renaming etc)
Sample transfer though, that’s a different matter.
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@t3h
Backup is coming, here’s Simon commenting on it:
We NEED Backup?
Any sampler worth anything has backup, it’s a given. Even a bloody pocket operator has backup.
It’s insane to me that the DT still doesn’t have backup a year after its release.
I’m looking at working with a band to do some live work and if so, we will be working on tracks together, makes me nervous that I won’t be able to backup any of the work we may do. Then to gig with no backup… ffs. Nerve racking!!!
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plus 1
How anyone might even consider such completely self-evident, BASIC requirements for digital gear as debatable, is completely beyond me. It would be utterly weird, if Elektron wouldn’t see and acknowledge the necessity.
I’m glad Simon’s comment brought some clarity into the matter.
I don’t know the exact technical specs of +drives. But I do know that digital storage media can fail, no matter if harddisks, SSDs or whatever. +drives will probably be no exception, sooner or later. You can just hope for the best for the time being. The risk of losing some or many hours of hard work can easily (and only) be avoided by backup functionality. It’s not as important, if Overbridge or the transfer tool provides it, as having it avilable at all. Overbridge would offer the better workflow context though from my view.
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Was hoping it would be released this spring break… Can’t wait to hook it up to ableton.
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Just to add another point to this, you don’t even need to have the +Drive fail to loose everything… what if the main board dies (the board that +Drive is soldered too), or you have a power surge fry the DT. What if the DT gets lost in transit or is stolen? Not having any backup is crazy.
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Or if it’s just a bad unit you need to exchange. The DT i’m returning, the screen protection cover isn’t properly glued so it keeps pulling up. Had I a bunch of samples on it, I’d have to deal with the defect or lose samples! Thankfully I didn’t sample anything to it before deciding to exchange it for a Digitone.
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Yup, defects and warranty repairs are another big one!
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It’s YOUR fault if this happens, as you should not expect a 700$+ device to have any way of backing up a years worth of work. According to Elektron anyway. You can use it for “serious” work, at your own risk.
PS i believe DT was rushed to market to compete with AKAI’s MPC Live. Reason being, I just can’t fathom people as smart and talented as the designers at Elektron releasing something w/out a backup solution off the bat otherwise.
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Maybe the case, but doesn’t the Rytm mk1 still not have backup? Wasn’t that released like 7 years ago? (I know it’s not a “sampler” and only loads samples, but still surprised me when I found out it also cannot be backed up and you have to keep a folder with a copy of every sample you ever copy to it as a “backup”)
At least Simon says it’s coming, fingers crossed it’s not another year or two before we get it 
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No backup on a completely digital sampling box that is aimed at live and holds 1Gb of work isn’t really credible to me. Bi-directional sample transfer was always promised, or at least inferred. What is ‘sample management functionality’ If it doesn’t allow you to manage the samples off the machine and onto the computer?
IMHO it should be possible to possible to back the rest of the box’s user data by MIDI bulk dump or similar approaches.
Can’t believe some seem to be wilfully ignoring pretty much all the competition in this area as well as the last decades of Sys Ex bulk dump, class compliant USB file access, removable memory cards, and going back further, SCSI interfaces on samplers etc etc.
I simply would not have bought it if I couldn’t back up samples. And I am still a little nervous to spend too long sampling on the box since I don’t like to lose work and effort. Ok I could treat DT solely as a disposable scratchpad for work in progress - but that’s not what was promised.
Bring it on, I say! 
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I logged a ticket when my Digi crashed. I was told sample backup will come so pretty sure we’ll see this at some point.
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Backing up samples is nothing to do with OverBridge or the announcement above.
Let’s keep it strictly On Topic please, there are threads for the other issues.
It’s quite clear that delivering OverBridge as soon as it’s ready is a top priority for Elektron, no amount of chat about this or that above or below is going to hasten that. I’m not at liberty to say much, but I can attest from discussions around the first beta phase to the complexities of delivering this from a development standpoint. It’s frustrating to see so many armchair developers offer easy solutions when they clearly don’t show a full understanding of the challenges. But I do agree that the marketing of the technology has been so pushed at the expense of credibility that it will test people’s goodwill and patience, but again, no amount of chat about that will change anything. The challenges will likely be about stability/performance and not about manpower and certainly not about expertise/willpower etc; you can predict how long it’ll take you to manufacture X synths, but you cannot predict with the same degree of confidence whether a technical challenge will be surmounted. I got the impression getting it right first time for the Mk1s was a bit like spinning plates and I can also attest to the long additional hours the developers put in to get it delivered. I’m not an apologist either, there are broader knock-on aspects of this whole OverBridge episode I find really disappointing and inexcusable, but you have to trust that these people know what they are doing and that we don’t know the whole story from out here. Having said that, I’ll be livid if Mavericks support is dropped when the new device OSs are rolled out assuming no support for the old OB (which was always stable and low latency on my modest machine - just not in terms of the interface sadly which was plagued with issues on my setup and preferred DAW)
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I’m sure Elektron would be very happy to see this thread closed, but you really shouldn’t do that. You’ll make the whole situation much worse.
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Really ? You seem to have access to informations I don’t have. Any hint on what is meant by “sample management” if it does not include backup ? I’d love to stay on topic, can you help ?
If there’s no backup in this “sample management”, then I’ll just stick with Crunch/Digitakt-manager for the management part (a very nice and useful app by one of those “armchair developers”) and I’ll happily leave this discussion thread.
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Nonsense.
Elektron stated that backing up and generally better file management is being held back until the next overbridge update.
So, while these are separate issues they are very much linked by being put into the same release.
In case you’re wondering, i don’t give a rat’s arse about OB, but i have been waiting for years for some proper file management thankyouverymuch.
The longer i wait, the more i get the feeling that the credits the scene is giving elektron is misplaced.
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That has been exactly my understanding of “Sample management functionality”:
how should this clearly announced feature even be possible without sample exchange back and forth between device and computer, of course implying backup functionality?
If that is true, how could this topic not belong into this thread???
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