Backup projects on USB stick?

[kdiamond]

Luckily SAC or my RIG never let me down. So far. But the show can easily turn to a disaster if any of rig link fails. Running a big show always requires to have a backup of mixers, some amps... in case of any failure. All bigger PA companies I know have bacups.

How to do it with SAC?

I can double the sound card setups and laptops, but how to deal with projects. Is there a way to set autosave to laptop internal HD + save to USB stick? In that case if laptop goes down for any reason, you simple plug another laptop (pre-configured of course) and load the project from USB stick and you are ready to rock.

How do you deal with this. Any good tricks?

Thank you
Br,
Dali

[Bob L]

Save often and then use the Save Copy As to save to another drive... you can then back up session files to a usb stick at any time.

The new version coming has an autosave option also.

Bob L

[kdiamond]

The new version coming has an autosave option also.

Bob L

By making an option to autosave on 2 different path would not be a bad at all. Let's say anything on laptop fails and you can not boot it or access the backup-ed project file. That's where USB stick would be a life saver.

So all you would have to do is to boot another laptop/PC and load the project. I don't exactly know how other digital systems handle this, but this looks like a real easy and fast solution.

Br,
Dali

[gdougherty]

Another user mentioned running SAC from a USB drive directly. Install everything to the USB, run it there, set your backup to run from it as well. Host crashes, pull the USB, plug it in a backup system, run it right where you last saved.

[RBIngraham]

I use a tool called SyncToy that you can get off the Microsoft Web site. It allows you to easily keep 2 folders in sync.

I like to keep all my show files in My Documents so that I just keep that backed up and then I know I have everything for any software I am running backed up.

SAC is such a small install that I also just keep the SAC folder on the C: drive backed up as well.

Now I normally have a NAS hard drive on site for my shows, but that's more to do with the fact that I usually have a bunch of audio playback files to deal with as well. When I'm doing a show with little to no audio playback, I just use a thumb drive as well. For most users here that are not dealing with show recordings or the like, a thumb drive will have more than enough space to keep all your mix sessions backed up as well as your SAC install as well. Even an old 1GB thumb drive can probably hold SAC plus several shows of mix files.

I wouldn't run from a thumb drive unless I needed to do so in an emergency. They are usually a lot slower at data transfers than even a modest hard drive. There are some that work very fast, but those are not the ones you pick up cheap at Microcenter or your local Office Max, etc...

Using SyncToy and thumb drive it would be easy to keep 2 computers with SAC running all the same. Assuming that they both have the same computer, sound card, and same patching.

[kdiamond]

Another user mentioned running SAC from a USB drive directly. Install everything to the USB, run it there, set your backup to run from it as well. Host crashes, pull the USB, plug it in a backup system, run it right where you last saved.

Wow, that sounds a bit unreliable, even to me. Though idea is great, but doesn't read/write access speed matters to SAC's performance. USB has by far slower write access time than HDD and I don't really know reliable USB sticks and a connection is.

So an attempt for backup might actually cause a problem? Anyone working this way?

Thank you
Br,
Dali

[RBIngraham]

Wow, that sounds a bit unreliable, even to me. Though idea is great, but doesn't read/write access speed matters to SAC's performance. USB has by far slower write access time than HDD and I don't really know reliable USB sticks and a connection is.

So an attempt for backup might actually cause a problem? Anyone working this way?

Thank you
Br,
Dali

I don't really think there is all that much disk activity with SAC unless you're loading plug ins and things that have to load samples or the like. So it's probably not a big deal. But I wouldn't go that route either unless it was an emergency. Firing off Scenes is the only thing that probably does much disk access with SAC except when starting up or loading a mix session.