User:Billw58/Backup Strategies

A place for folks to give share their thoughts on making a "Backup Strategies" page for the Manual.

• Peter 4May12: this is beginning to read like "the parable of the wise and foolish virgins" ;-)>

Ed 4May12: mercilessly edited

• checked for spelling & grammar
• links verified (note that the menu spans do not have links)
• Bill 01May12:
  • @Ed: I prefer the longish introduction section and a short punchy intro div. Also, your alert div makes sense to us but may not make sense to a naive user. Copied it into this ednote and created an advice div in the introduction section.

Always make an external copy of your raw data (original recording), never work with the original material!

• Gale: 05May12 This looks to me a considerable duplication of existing documentation ( Audacity Projects and Making a backup copy of a project). Wouldn't a FAQ be better? It could point out (as Peter said) that Audacity Projects are not well suited to long term storage (because they are not a unitary format). Hence the emphasis is two-fold: backup a project (if you are even saving one) but for almost all cases, export WAV files. Make clear what extra information the project saves compared to WAV.

  I thought we had agreed, absolutely no dashes?

  • Bill05May12: I don't agree that "Audacity Projects are not well suited to long term storage". If they're zipped, what's the problem? As PGA points out in the forum thread, the loss of gain, pan and envelope settings (plus having those settings rendered) is a major drawback of exporting tracks to WAV.
• Bill 04May12: Are we all agreed that the advice to "export a WAV of your multi-track project as a backup" is absolutely useless and should be expunged from the Manual (if it still exists anywhere)?
• Gale 05May12: -1. Of course people should export a WAV for each track of the project.
• Bill 05May12: The implication, as I recall, was a straight Export (not Export Multiple), which is useless as a backup of a multi-track project. Exporting individual tracks will render the gain, pan and envelope settings which is a major drawback and must be noted.
• Peter 5May:When we are recommending backup by exporting to WAV below we are implicitly recommending backup to 16-bit PCM WAV. For users working in the default 32-bit float mode in Audacity the best quality capture, and intermediate editing stages, woul be to export as 32-bit WAV surely - but we don't state that.
  Nor can I see any advice about backing up a set of finished production WAVs anywhere in this article. The finished product needs backup protection every bit as much as the capture and intermediate stages - the finished product is the bit that contains the most work after all.

This page is about backup strategies particular to Audacity. These should be used in conjunction with - not as a replacement for - regular backup procedures.

• Gale: Regular backups of what? All the computer's data? Or just the recorded file? Or that plus a second backup of the project?
• Bill 05May12: I meant regular whole-computer or whole-disk backups.

The recommendations on this page are just that: recommendations. Each user should consider their own workflow and develop a backup regime that meets their needs.

Introduction

If you have not already done so, please read the Audacity Projects page, taking particular note of the "Four rules for keeping your Audacity project happy". Backups may not help you if you damage your project by breaking those rules.

Audacity has very robust crash recovery and in most cases will be able to recover your work in case of a power failure, computer crash or crash of Audacity itself. The wise user does not rely on crash recovery, and has appropriate backups in place for those rare circumstances where Audacity's crash recovery can't do the job.

• Gale: In other words, regularly exported WAV files. Probably a good idea to be explicit here.
• Bill05May12: That's not what I meant. I was deliberately being vague. Export-multiple-by-track to WAV is not my preference except in the case of a "simple" project. For complex projects incremental backups of the Project structure is my preference.

The wise user also knows that hard drives can crash destroying all data and makes regular backups to external storage. The cautious user makes duplicate backups to at least two different external storage devices; the extremely cautious user ensures that at least one of those backups is held off-site.

The nature of audio editing, especially when it involves recording live audio, means that daily backups may not be sufficient. There are also things you can do that are specific to Audacity that will make it easier to make appropriate backups.

Always backup a recording (ideally to an external USB hard drive) before you start editing it.

If you choose the audio cache option in Directories Preferences to cache data to RAM (memory), no data will be written to disk during a recording. Recoverable data will be written to disk after recording stops, but recordings that crash in progress will be permanently lost.

Peter 5May12: I don't see the relevance of the audio cache advice to this backup article. The user will not be backing up the project while recording, you can't back up a project while it's recording.
And should we be saying in the first advice note above "(ideally to an external USB or FireWire hard drive)"

• Ed 5May12 "ideally to an external USB or FireWire hard drive" Not IMVHO. I use an eSATA external hard drive and an external SCSI tape drive (my FireWire drive is a primary drive not for backup; Lightning drives are available for Mac and soon for us mere mortals); I also use thumb drives, flash memory cards and internal CDrw/DVDrw drives for backup, why be exclusive? My opinion is that the text should be more like:

Always backup a recording (ideally to external media) before you start editing.

Ed 5May12 I do not like two identical style (alert in this case) divs back-to-back; maybe:

Always backup a recording (ideally to an external USB hard drive) before you start editing it. If you choose the audio cache option in Directories Preferences to cache data to RAM (memory), no data will be written to disk during a recording. Recoverable data will be written to disk after recording stops, but recordings that crash in progress will be permanently lost.

Create a folder in which to store your project

Many users prefer to create a new folder on their hard drive in which to store their project; the AUP file and the _data folder are both inside this folder making it easy to keep them together if you need to move them to another location on your hard drive. This also creates a place to store other files associated with the project such as exported WAV backup files and production notes.

Be safe - copy all external files into your project

Before importing a WAV or AIFF file into your project, click on Edit > Preferences, click on the Import / Export section and select  Make a copy of uncompressed audio files before editing (safer). Later, when you save your project you will not need to think about including those files in the backup.

Backing up simple projects

A simple project is one that consists of one stereo or mono track; examples would be digitizing LPs or cassettes, recording an audio book or editing a recorded interview.

Once you have completed the original recording (entire LP or cassette, audio book chapter, interview etc.) click File > Export to export the entire track as WAV, AIFF or FLAC. Save the file in the same folder as the project (not in the _data folder, use the folder that contains the _data folder and AUP file). If anything bad happens to your project (such as a disastrous edit that you can't recover from) you can always go back to your original unedited recording by starting a new project and importing the WAV, AIFF or FLAC file.

One user's experience
A user was digitizing his LP collection; he applied aggressive noise reduction and click removal to an LP and exported the result. Sometime later he realized that he had damaged the audio in his zeal to get rid of the noise, clicks and pops. Unfortunately, he had not saved his original recordings and had to record the LP again.

Peter 5May12: I'm not sure that the LP use-case is a good one. In this situation the ultimate backup is the vinyl (unless, like me, you sent it to the thrift store) and all the user needs to do is re-record. We might be better with an example using a one-off FM broadcast capture that was un-repeatable - thoughts? Unless in the current use-case we get the user to sell the LP in the intervening period...

Backing up complex projects

A complex project is one which consists of more than one track; examples of such a project would be a multi-track music production with overdubs, voice mixed with music on another track or an interview where the two parties are on separate tracks.

Periodically click on File > Save Project As... to save a version of your project with a different but meaningful name; the frequency will depend the complexity of your edits and other factors. The purpose of these multiple projects is to give you a version of your project that you can go back to in the unlikely event that Audacity or your computer crashes while you are in the midst of recording or editing. In most cases Audacity will be able to recover your project in the state it was in just before the crash but there are exceptional cases where Audacity will not be able to do this. Having a previous version that was not being actively worked on at the time of the crash will let you start from that version rather from the beginning. This is especially important if you are engaged in overdubbing; losing a good performance due to a computer crash or power failure is beyond frustrating. These periodic backups also give you a known state of your project to go back to in the event of a disastrous edit from which you cannot recover.

One user's experience
A band was doing a multi-track recording session; all went well with the recordings and they had a nice multi-track project with vocals, drums, bass and guitar on separate tracks. During mixdown they applied equalization and compression to the tracks and added reverb to the vocals. Sometime later they realized that they had put too much reverb on the vocals. Unfortunately they had not saved a version of the project before they added the reverb. There was no way to remove the reverb from the vocals so their only recourse was to record the vocals again.

Incremental backups

• Bill 04May12:
  • This seems to be an expansion of the incremental backups alluded to in the above section, but seems to apply to a "simple" project. Backing up each original capture during a multi-track overdubbing session would, IMO, be disruptive to the session. Furthermore, doing an Export-multiple-by-track for a multi-track project may not be appropriate or useful as Audacity no longer preserves the white space at the start of a track so the position of a punch-in is not preserved.
  • I don't get the distinction between "tuneOriginal.WAV" and "tuneRaw.WAV".
    • Ed: just that you want redundancy in the copy of your original raw data
  • The use of the "tune" directory and "tune..." file name is confusing.
    • Ed: That is my way—I would not complain if someone had a better naming convention to offer.
  • At the moment I think we getting too detailed in this section.
    • Ed: Many naive users need this level of hand-holding; I see this as a Tutorial, more than a Tip and the detail is what the user is looking for (IMVHO).
      • Bill: In that case I'd hive this off onto a separate page and reference it from this page, similar to the "Example Workflows" on the Tutorials page. That page could then have input from those of us who have particular backup workflows. This page is not a tutorial page IMO.
• Gale: You can be pragmatic with a multi-track session. Back up the captures every three tracks when they break for coffee. If it's a band, won't they be able to send a feed to another computer which can record the back up? How far do we go? Uninterruptible power supplies?

  Did Audacity ever preserve white space at the start when exporting? 1.3.11 (well before Richard's changes) doesn't. What is different is that Mix and Render is no longer a solution because it does not render the initial white space as silence, which would preserve the lead-in. So we just tell them to double-click close to the start of the audio, LEFT, hold SHIFT then press HOME, then Generate > Silence.

  I would recommend naming the incremental projects and WAV's with the date and time.

• Bill 05May12: This is the problem - how specific do we get. I started this page so we'd have a basis for discussion; I'm not proposing that everything on this page needs to be here. In fact, it may turn out that this should be on the Wiki as "recommended workflows" since everyone has their own ideas of what is appropriate.
  Yes, for multi-track projects, at break time, doing an export-by-track of recordings since the last break is doable. But, again, how specific do we want to get?

Once you have gotten to the point of having some audio recorded (or imported), before doing anything else, you should save both a WAV (a lossless uncompressed, FLAC format is another possibility) file of your raw recording (for details see Export) and then an Audacity Project (for details see Saving).

Make your edits; if you are making a lot of changes save a new Project with a different name--use menu File > Save Project As... from time to time (this will give you incremental backups on disk). At least once a day (more often if desired) save the Project on an external drive.

When you are happy with all your edits, make a final Save Project As... under a new name; as a result you might have something like:

C:\tune\tuneRaw.aup

C:\tune\tune1.aup

C:\tune\tune2.aup

C:\tune\tune3.aup

[...]

C:\tune\tuneFinal.aup

C:\tune\tuneOriginal.wav

C:\tune\tuneRaw.wav

C:\tune\Tune.wav

C:\tune\Tune.mp3

on your hard drive and:

T:\tune\tune4.aup

T:\tune\tune9.aup

T:\tune\tune12.aup

[...]

T:\tune\tuneFinal.aup

T:\tune\tuneOriginal.wav

T:\tune\tuneRaw.wav

T:\tune\Tune.wav

T:\tune\Tune.mp3

on an external drive and also on one (or a series of) CD(s) or DVD(s).

C:\tune\tuneOriginal.wav is the original raw recording
T:\tune\tuneOriginal.wav is a copy of the original raw recording
C:\tune\tuneRaw.wav is the working copy of the original raw recording
C:\tune\tune1.aup is the original Audacity Project with no edits—just the original audio
C:\tune\tune2.aup is the first incremental backup Audacity Project with edits
T:\tune\tune4.aup is the first incremental backup Audacity Project stored externally

note: we do not store every incremental backup externally

C:\tune\Tune.wav is the final production version of the audio ready to be burned to CD
C:\tune\Tune.mp3 is the final compressed version of the audio ready to be e-mailed or put on an iPod®

note: both Tune.WAV and Tune.mp3 are stored externally

Archiving finished projects

One safe and sure way of keeping your project files and folders together is to make a zip archive. Save the zip file on an external drive, CD-R or DVD-R if it will fit, or, better yet, both. If you ever need to revisit the project you can unzip it and continue editing, overdubbing or whatever.

Time Machine on Mac OS X

Time Machine will save hourly backups for the previous 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and monthly backups for the past year. If this frequency of backup is not good enough (for example when actively overdubbing) periodically save versions of the project as outlined above in "Backing up complex projects". Since those periodic versions never change Time Machine will keep them around for one year (or until your Time Machine disk fills up).

Gale: If it is necessary to teach users in detail how to use their computer we should mention Windows "Previous versions" too and put this on the Wiki.

• Peter 5May12: I agree with Gale here. This article is not "Managing Your Computer 101" it's about managaing Audacity data. So I don't think specific ways of doing it on specific platforms is necessary here.

Archive your finished projects to an external hard drive other than your Time Machine drive. Alternatively, archive your projects to CD-R or DVD-R.

Notes from the forum thread that started this all

Steve's notes from the forum thread:

Backing up all original recordings in a lossless (WAV/FLAC) file format is a wise thing to do regardless of the type of project. WAV and FLAC are robust formats and even in the unlikely event of a little data loss there is still a reasonably good chance of recovering most of the data. Audacity Projects on the other hand, particularly complex editing sessions can easily be turned to dust by a single small error.

For complex projects my advice would be: First: back-up any original recorded material in WAV of FLAC format. Use "Save As" periodically to create back-up copies of the project. (my-project-001, my-project-002, my-project-003, ...)

Saved Projects do not save the Undo history, so having a trail of projects can be invaluable for "restoring" to a previous version.

Use the "copy in" option or use "File > Check Dependencies" before saving the project to ensure that the project is complete.

Before starting a project, create a new folder and put everything that is related to the project (all WAV files, saved Project versions, notes to self...) into that folder. It is much easier to keep track of the project if it is all in one place.

For long term storage of a project, make a zip archive of the .AUP file and the _data folder.

For important projects, keep at least one external backup copy of both the Project and the original "source" audio files (an external hard drive can be very useful for this).

If you really don't want to lose your trousers, use a belt AND braces.

Bill said:

The problem is that different strategies will work better for different types of projects. For LP digitizing a simple Export-to-wav retains the original capture. For multi-track projects this is impractical for many reasons. To be general enough all the page could say is "back up your projects - keeping the AUP and _data folder together - to external media on a regular basis". Backup will help people who insist on renaming projects or messing with the contents of the _data folder - at least they can recover from their own incompetence. Better would be if the would RTFM and not do those things.