 This may be the most important video you ever watched from me if you choose to skip it or ignore it because let's face it It's a little bit boring, then you may come to regret that big time Let's talk about the best way to back up your music studio data Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you will and I hope your music production data as well also I went for many years without any hard drive failures, and I didn't lose any data then in the space of 18 months I lost one hard drive and two SSDs now on those occasions I didn't lose any music production data But I did lose some precious old photos of my children gone never to be seen again to be honest with you It was quite an emotional experience And I knew it was only a matter of time before I did lose some music production files Which perhaps I've been working on for months and may contain performances. I can never replicate So I set about looking for a much better solution and looking around at what other music producers were doing I found quite a lot of flaws in their methodology. We'll be taking a look at that later But I will be setting out my current solution, which I believe is excellent and involves using this black box here The Synology DS920 plus but more on that later. First of all, let's take a look at what you may be doing wrong The worst kind of backup is to copy your files to the same drive in your computer. If that drive fails, everything is lost So what a lot of you do is copy your files to something like this an external SSD or hard drive And this methodology is absolutely fine as long as you maintain a copy What some of you will do is copy your files from your computer to this drive and then eventually Delete the original files from your computer. Of course, then you've only got one copy of your data And if this drive fails everything is lost But as I say as long as you maintain the copy, this is not a bad start However, there are some other issues with this namely the human error issue You need to make sure you diligently do your backup to this drive Maybe several times a day or at least once a day You can bet your life that the one time you're too busy too lazy or you just forget will be the one time that drive will fail And your data or at least your most recent data will be gone The other issue with this is it doesn't take into account things like fire, something like a house fire Or theft where maybe all of your gear will get stolen or some other natural disaster For that you need an offsite copy So the idea of an offsite backup is that your data is in a completely different location Not subject to the same conditions like natural disasters or physical theft or even things like flood or fire I was recently watching another music YouTuber and his solution for this was to take a copy of all of his data once a week And drive it over to his grandmother's house on the other side of town And the problem with this is that of course he was only doing it once a week He would have to do all of that manually and his grandmother's house may be subject to the same kind of natural disasters that his place is So what's the solution to this? Well recently of course the solution has been to use cloud services We can upload our data to a server probably in a completely different part of the world Now this is fine but again it contains that manual element It's fairly tedious and long-winded to do and you may have something much more interesting and much more important to do So these are all the problems. What's the solution? So the solution I've been using is a reflection of long-established principles in data protection The first one of those is the 3-2-1 rule which states you should always maintain three copies of your data Your original or working copy which is normally on your computer and two backups Now at least one of those backups should be off-site So for example I may have my song data which is created by my door on my computer I've created backup on an external drive like this one and then I've got another backup Which may be on something like Google Drive or Dropbox or some other off-site storage or online storage area Now the other principle I'm adhering to is something called redundancy That is where if any of my drive should fail or my backup drive should fail Then my data can be rebuilt using the other drives. That's rather clever So those are the principles involved. How am I actually going about doing this? This is the Synology DS920 Plus and I have four four terabyte drives inside it That's 16 terabytes of drive space in total. Now you of course may not need anywhere near that much Now this is not to be confused with a hard drive enclosure That's the kind of thing you would typically connect up to your computer via USB This is a NAS, a network area storage device So it connects to your system via the network so it doesn't even need to be in the same room as you It doesn't need to be in your studio making any extra unwanted noise Now the thing about a NAS is it's smart It can automatically take care of some of the tasks we've been talking about earlier Plus this one has a few bonus features which I think are really useful for music producers We'll get to that later, but first of all I'd like to talk about its redundancy So I was easily able to install my four drives by popping them in their drive trays And slotting them into the front of the system. No tools required And I can even swap out a faulty drive while the system is still running Now if this were a traditional hard drive enclosure I would just simply start to save my data there The problem would be is if one of my hard drives were to fail I would lose the data on that drive Something some people do is to save their data to the first two drives and then copy or mirror that across to the other two drives The issue with that as a solution is that although I would have a backup of my data I would only have 8 terabytes available of my 16 terabytes of drive space That's not very appealing to me So thankfully with a NAS system like this things are a lot smarter We can use something called a RAID configuration and striping With this our data is cleverly stored across all of our four drives at once In such a way that if one of those drives were to fail we can swap it out And the data on it can be rebuilt from information on the other three drives This gives us something called redundancy Now with some other systems they require that when you're using RAID You have to have four drives or three or whatever it is you're using All of the same size and perhaps even the same model With Synology they have a variation on RAID which I'm using And with that you can mix and match drives of different sizes and models I find that incredibly useful Now for my 16 terabytes of drive this means I actually have 12 terabytes available With this system I think that's a price worth paying for the peace of mind I get So of course your Synology NAS drive is accessed from your computer via your network And you could just drag files from your computer to the drives or folders on that NAS drive Of course the problem here is human error you may forget or what have you So it's much better to have an automated solution So for this I use the Synology Drive client This is a free app which can automatically check certain folders on your computer To look for changes, things like new files or modified files When it finds changes it makes backups to your NAS drive automatically It happens without you even knowing about it If it needs to check at a time when your computer is switched off It will just check the next time it gets switched on Now of course the initial transfer of files if you've got a lot of them can take quite some time But once that initial one is done of course it's only saving changes So it's very small amounts of data which is being transferred across your network To be honest I never even notice it's happening It's one of those set and forget features So we have two parts of our puzzle solved Our data is automatically backed up to our NAS without us having to think about it And there is some redundancy involved If one of the drives in the NAS should fail we will still be able to maintain our data there So what about the next part Making sure that our data is also backed up to the cloud or to another location Well before we get into that we need to understand that this NAS is actually a little computer With its own operating system Now that may sound a little bit intimidating But in fact it's rather user friendly Let's take a look So we actually log into this operating system which is called DSM Through our web browser And that's what I'm looking at it with now This is in my Chrome web browser And as you can see it's much like a desktop in something like Windows or Mac We have this desktop and things are draggable here So this information window here is draggable and I can minimize it like so Then we've got this kind of notification area up here Which is quite useful And then we've got some icons over here Which are kind of shortcuts if you like to different operations Now we can for example click on this file station icon Which is a bit like browsing folders in your desktop operating system So we can open several windows like that if we wish And then we could if we want dragg files or folders from one window to another Just like you would on a Windows or Mac operating system You can even drag items from your main desktop on your computer To this window to quickly and easily transfer files that way if you wish Now of course the main power of a system like this Or like any operating system comes from the apps or programs which are installed Now we install those via this package center We just click on this up here It's a little bit like an app store if you like You can browse the various things that you can install You can get a bit more detail on them if you like Say by clicking on this here and you can read all about them what they do And if you want to install them just click on the install button Nothing technical to do or anything like that They just simply install onto your system And then they become available via the main menu Now this is kind of like the start button in Windows if you like You click on it up here the main menu and click on that And then you can see all of your installed apps And you just execute them from there Well by the way if you're finding this video useful Could you go ahead and hit the like button for me Do it right away so that you don't forget Alternatively hit the dislike button twice And if you do like this kind of content make sure you subscribe And ring the bell so that you're notified about my other videos Now the final part of our puzzle is to make a backup of our data And store it remotely or on a cloud service Now exactly how you go about doing this May depend upon the current services you are using Let's take a look One of the apps you may choose for this is called cloud sync I'll open that now Now there are a number of popular cloud services that you can use with this And you can easily set up scheduled sync or backup tasks However I eventually decided to go with Synology's own service called C2 I found that that was most cost effective for me And extremely easy to use Now the app we use with this is called Hyperbackup I'll just open that up now Now you can easily set up any number of scheduled backups For whatever folders you choose on your NAS I've set up most of mine to happen in the middle of the night When I'm sleeping Again this is a set and forget kind of a feature I initially set up a few months ago And it's all happened automatically Without any input or action from me But of course it will notify you if there are any problems Now just like the PC to NAS backup The initial backup to the cloud did take some time Because there was lots of data However once you're up and running It's only actually transferring new or modified files So you definitely don't notice much of an impact on your network So I actually went for the $69.99 US dollars per year plan Which gives me one terabyte of space Now you may be asking, but Mike How can you get by with one terabyte of space When you've actually got a 12 terabyte unit here Well the answer to that is I'm only actually using around about 2.8 terabytes of this so far And remember I've got lots of video content on there as well The other thing about this is Is that lots of my data has other What I'm going to call natural cloud storage What do I mean by that Well lots of it for example is made up of large sample libraries I can always redownload those from the original producer From the maker of those libraries So in a way they're taking care of the cloud storage Of those sample libraries for me Another example would be my YouTube videos I like to archive all of them I like to keep a copy of all of them But of course there's also a copy on YouTube itself Which I can always download So in a way YouTube are already taking care Of that cloud storage for me So I'm actually left with 365 gigabytes of data Which I actually need to store in that cloud space with Synology So I've got plenty to spare And I can always increase it in the future if I want to To be honest I've hardly scratched the surface Of what this unit can do You could also use it as a media server And it's a great place to store and organize your photos as well Lots of other sort of server type tasks And collaboration tasks as well You can even upgrade its memory from 4 gigabytes to 8 gigabytes And you can insert an M.2 drive for better performance Although I haven't felt the need for those upgrades With the kinds of tasks that we've discussed so far Now there are a couple of smaller features with it Which I think are a big bonus for the studio So on the front of the device we can see a USB 3 port And when we use that in conjunction with an app called USB copy Supplied by Synology We can configure it so that it will recognize particular devices Like hard drives or USB sticks when they're plugged in And it will look for any new or modified files on there And copy them to specific locations This is incredibly useful If you're recording say a band on location You're taking your laptop and you're recording using an external hard drive Like this When you arrive back to your studio after a gruelling session You simply plug this drive into the front And it will copy over any new or modified files Without you having to log in Or without you having to switch on a computer Or anything like that Those files are now going to be available on the network To any other computers which you designate on that network So you could start working with them in the studio right away That's incredibly useful Now what about if you want to share some files externally With a band that you're working with or something Maybe some mixes or something like that For that we'll use a feature called Quick Connect So perhaps you want to share mixes or stems with artists And they're too big to share by email And you don't want to use services like Dropbox or Google Drive Because perhaps you're concerned about security Or the amount of space you're using there Well you can actually use a feature on this called Quick Connect Which will share files over the internet directly from your NAS It generates a custom URL which you can supply to your contacts You're in complete control of the data You can even protect it with things like passwords And it just makes that process really really easy And in this day and age of remote collaboration I think this is an absolute godsend Data loss can be incredibly painful when it happens to you So it's great to have a better solution Now I've been using this system for the last few months And whilst no system is absolutely foolproof I really believe in it and it's been an absolute delight to use Yes, it automatically backs up my music data to the NAS Without me having to think about it And yes, there's some redundancy involved And yes, it automatically backs it up to the cloud Without me having to think about it And that points to the best feature for me Just how transparent this is in my workflow Once I did the initial setup I've not really had to think about it I've just been busy making music and videos for you guys Now check out the link in the description down below To find out about this unit I would love to hear about your experiences With either data loss or other solutions What are your successes and what are your failures? Let me know in the comments down below Thank you so much for joining me for the whole of this video Let me know if you did make it to the end I'd be impressed And I'll see you in the next video