Backing Up an External Hard Drive

PantsGod · 2023-12-26T21:01:12.806Z

What’s good ya’ll!

Wondering if someone on here might know how to backup the contents of an external hard drive.

Here’s my situation:

I make all my stuff in Maschine. I backup all the contents on my Mac to Time Machine religiously.

However, I store all my samples on a SS external hard drive. If I were to lose the drive, and load up a project in Maschine, my projects would be missing all of the one shots that I have loaded in, plus all my sample based plugins that I drag samples into would be missing all the content as well. Although I could theoretically load each missing sample back in one by one (they mostly come from Splice), the projects would be ostensibly lost, even with everything backed up to Time Machine.

Is there a way to like “clone” the hard drive? I’m assuming that even if I bought an identical drive and loaded the exact same sounds, organized the same way, my computer still wouldn’t recognize the file paths.

I had a mini panic attack the other day when I thought I lost the tiny little drive, but I ended up finding it (phew!). But it got me thinking that my stuff isn’t really backed up unless my external drive is backed up.

If anyone has any ideas on this, that would be sweet!

shigginpit · 2023-12-26T21:29:04.352Z

On windows, you would right click on the external drive’s icon and select “copy” from the right click menu, then in your desired backup destination (a file on your primary drive, a usb drive, a new ssd etc) select “paste” and the contents of the entire drive would be copied, thus creating a backup. I’d assume it’s similar on a mac but I’ve never tried so not sure the commands are the same? Think it’s pretty straight forward though.

NUoldNu · 2023-12-26T21:31:58.583Z

This was exactly what I was going to suggest, but it seems too straightforward. Perhaps OP could comment on how feasible it is on a mac?

shigginpit · 2023-12-26T21:34:11.671Z

External drives are generally pretty simple because it doesn’t contain an operating system, so unless there’s a reason to create a partition it’s mostly copy paste or click and drag, what have you.

Like I said, though, I couldn’t be certain with mac, just assuming they don’t make it too complicated.

balph · 2023-12-26T21:35:59.663Z

I’ve been using Carbon Copy Cloner on the Mac for over a decade now, it’s a really good backup solution with a lot of flexibility. I’m using it to make both onsite and offsite backups, I also like that it can do a health check every few weeks/months to make sure that your backup is not corrupted in any way.

jamesstiff · 2023-12-26T23:18:27.546Z

balph:

I’ve been using Carbon Copy Cloner on the Mac for over a decade now, it’s a really good backup solution with a lot of flexibility.

+1 for Carbon Copy Cloner. Great for cloning drives and creating bootable backups too.

BLKrbbt · 2023-12-27T00:21:09.755Z

PantsGod:

. If I were to lose the drive, and load up a project in Maschine, my projects would be missing all of the one shots that I have loaded in, plus all my sample based plugins that I drag samples into would be missing all the content as well.

There is an option to save sample with project in Maschine.

I would recommend everything everyone else has already recommended, but also go back and open all the projects and re-save WITH samples.

Then copy the destination folder over to a couple redundant hard drives.

And this is good to think about. I back up to SSD and a platter based hard drive, plus a third that is dedicated to time Maschine.

Plus I save all my samples on an SD card in my 404.

And another copy on my iPad Pro.

I’ve collected WAY too many samples (over 260 gigs) to even to be able to know where I got them.

philroyjenkins · 2023-12-27T00:40:01.755Z

I’ll scope this out.

I’m about ready to set up some backups of a big project and I’m new to Mac / Time Machine. It was a surprise to me that I couldn’t just select a specific directory and only back that up.

Can you speak on this in the context of DAW projects? Lets say I work on a song and make some tweaks, how is this handled?

E: I started the trial and it answered all of my questions well. Picking this up, thanks dudes.

PantsGod · 2023-12-27T02:20:36.082Z

Thank you all for the replies! You know I’ve always seen that “save project with samples” but I honestly don’t think I’ve ever clicked on it in the 13 years I’ve been using Maschine! Feeling a bit foolish atm, because that seems pretty clear as day, what it’s for lol.

Any idea if that also applies to samples loaded into plugins inside Maschine?

Anyways, seriously thank ya’ll! Going to look into Carbon Copy, and also saving project with samples, and then moving them to another drive. If people have other methods they use, I’d love to hear em also!

BLKrbbt · 2023-12-27T06:14:10.966Z

PantsGod:

Any idea if that also applies to samples loaded into plugins inside Maschine?

I do not. But knowing how Maschine can be kinda old school, I would say I wouldnt trust it.

I would say err on the side of nope. But I would just resample them and add them as an audio one shot to keep an archive of it. That way you can dial in a similar sound if there was ever a problem… and you want to work on an older project.

If its loaded into a battery drum rack, then just check the folders to see if the rack saved the samples in the folder… but worst case scenario, just export the loop as audio like the other stuff to get a record of wheat is there, and if you need to go back, you can just chop the audio to get the same hits…

Im sure there is a better way, but Im just spitballing worst case scenarios here…

Edit… Thanks @balph and @jamesstiff . I just picked up Carbon Copy too! Even got an Educational Discount!