I’m usually pretty careful to back up my computers, but what a horror to find my HP Elitebook stuck in an endless loop of trying to repair Windows startup, without a usable back up and without any saved restore points…5 days and $130 later everything’s back (including Cantabile song, set list and rack files). I just have to reinstall all programs.
I’ve learned my lesson good! Weekly full disk back ups along with auto- restore point for windows
I would have said put the drive in another machine as a non system drive- without having to boot it I assume you could have got to your data files and such, and then just reinstalled Windows. Glad you worked it out!
I’m sorry this happened to you but thanks for sharing. I always make a synchronised copy of all my Cantabile and DAW files on an external SSD anyway but you’ve just reminded me to create a full disk image of my main SSD.
I keep all my Cantabile files (songs, racks, setlists, presets) in a Dropbox folder and sync it between my studio PC, live laptop and backup laptop, so there are always at least three copies around. Plus, I back up my whole Dropbox to the cloud via Duplicati.
All my relevant directories on my DAW PC are backed up both locally (USB HD) and to the cloud daily via Duplicati. Local backup makes restore faster, while the cloud backup adds geo-redundancy.
You can tell I’m an ex-CIO and paranoid when it comes to backup and redundancy😁
Cheers,
Torsten
Last year I saw a post where Torsten explained how he is backing up C3 files by setting up folder locations in DropBox located folders. I followed his instructions and have practiced the drill of swapping out my primary laptop with my backup. It works but takes some organization. I keep a log of plugin installs and upgrades so when I turn on my backup laptop I remember to run those.
My advice to exec’s who travel is turn on their laptop the day before a trip and make sure it’s online so it catches up on updates over their fast office connection instead of on slow hotel wifi while they’re trying to work.
I run some cpu intensive plugins (Jamstix, IK Leslie, VB3 II) when I practice and sometimes, even though I’m on Windows 10 Pro and have delayed feature updates and set specific update hours, after I wake up the laptop background services plus my plugins max out the i5 3360m processor in the machine. I’m now in a habit of waking up the machine, practicing scales for 10 minutes and then practicing with C3.
If I was pro I probably wouldn’t allow my machines online!
I started keeping my Cantablile files in a GitHub repository. Backup for catastrophes wasn’t the main reason: I wanted to be able to tag a specific configuration that I used successfully for a particular performance, so that I could recall it quickly even after making substantial experimental changes.
Works well, and I get the additional benefit of being able to see quickly what changes I’ve made using diff.
Me too! I use Dropbox for most things (plugins, sample libraries etc), but Cantabile settings/songs/racks etc. go to GitHub. It’s so great to have named versioning, and be able to control when things are synced between different machines.
Neil
One thing that might be obvious, but just in case: Don’t run git checkout (or anything like that) while Cantabile is running!