Great services, mediafire is so fast it’s ridiculous. These sites are definitely really handy, but I never had problems with drive failure until the past few years, weird coincidence.

If online storage is feasible, another option is using GMail’s 3 GB mailbox size limit to your advantage:
Welcome to the world of Gmail Space As Google Drive:
http://www.sizlopedia.com/2007/08/11/utilities-to-use-gmail-space-as-google-drive/

If fast internet connection is not feasible, one of these methods may help:

One-time, FULL/PERFECT BACKUP
1. Use a partition copy program to backup your entire disk or partition to another physical disk (usb/firewire/etc). (for Windows: Symantec Ghost or Acronis True Image) (for Mac, OOTB available Disk Utility -insert system/OS DVD, hold down ‘c’ while rebooting-)

Regular, FULL/PERFECT BACKUPS (same technique as incremental copying)
2.a. [Windows] Now use “robocopy.exe /mir” to keep folders/files in perfect synch (only different files get copied over to desination). Frequent (and much less time consuming) backups are possible.

2.b. [Mac] I’m sure there’a folder sunchronization utility/service in OS X.

3. Now, store the new hard drive in another physical location (today a fire alarm forced an immediate evacuation of the apartment, and both my primary and backup disks were left home – big mistake).

the problem with this article is that you are breaking the Terms and Conditions of the hosting sites by uploading copyrighted material (ie your mp3 files)….

therefore I dont see this as a valid way of backing up your files

maybe mozy.com is better, but that has limitations too

Why not Megaupload? No limits at all,with ftp and 200$ lifetime membership.
any cons on that…

uploading your mp3 files to an online service for *personal* backup doesn’t violate any copyright laws. that’s called “fair use”.

…

For me this technology is great but “digital cloud” has its own danger: centralizate media = easy culture control.

As any “tool” use makes the good/bad…

Maybe a solution with shared harddisk (not p2p) with people control instead “majors/corps” control (real control of telecomunications) will be more reasonable in my opinion.

Just my2cents.

Great Article, DJTT.

…

[quote comment="22646"]the problem with this article is that you are breaking the Terms and Conditions of the hosting sites by uploading copyrighted material (ie your mp3 files)….

therefore I dont see this as a valid way of backing up your files

maybe mozy.com is better, but that has limitations too[/quote]

if your uploading an image of your hard drive its not breaking the terms and conditions. or you guys could pack all your tracks and apps onto a compressed format like rar or zip and upload that. as long as you dont share your tracks you aren’t breaking TOC.

@celosdedma; @ian3dge; @gfocus
You guys are just wondering about the Terms and Conditions or you’r sure of what are you saying?

@Ean
I think that this type of legal information is missing in your article Ean, I would be glad if you upload this legal info about the services too.
Great Article indeed DJTT!

It’s not a Ean’s post, sorry for that markkus, the credit is yours but the question stills..
Thanks in advance :)

I use Dropbox for syncing all of my music and its meta content. That makes me able to set up all of my music on any computer in just a coule of minutes.

Here´s a quick how to: http://carlj.se/index.php/tech/3-music/11-sharing-itunes-library-between-two-computers-using-dropbox

[quote comment=""]I use Dropbox for syncing all of my music and its meta content. That makes me able to set up all of my music on any computer in just a coule of minutes.

Here´s a quick how to: http://carlj.se/index.php/tech/3-music/11-sharing-itunes-library-between-two-computers-using-dropbox/quote

Use Dropbox or iDisk (me.com)

I just use a Windows Home Server device (Acer easyStore H340) as a back-up and media sharing device for all my data in mu home network, including my 300 Gig music collection.

Windows Home Server allows me to retrieve my music from everywhere around the world, just using a browser. Highly recommendable.

[quote comment="22652"]@celosdedma; @ian3dge; @gfocus
You guys are just wondering about the Terms and Conditions or you’r sure of what are you saying?
[/quote]

i read the terms and conditions and it says specifically you cannot post content that violates copyright, theres no ‘fair usage’ in an online service for storing files.

‘fair usage’ comes into play when your incorporating someones content for education purposes (as an example – its more complicated than that), it certainly cannot be justified in storing someone elses copyright on an online storage website.

[quote comment="22654"]I use Dropbox for syncing all of my music and its meta content. That makes me able to set up all of my music on any computer in just a coule of minutes.

[/quote]

We use Dropbox to collaborate on Ableton Live projects. It works amazingly well. Here’s our write-up:

http://knobjockeys.org/blog/collaborating-on-ableton-music-projects-in-the-cloud-with-dropbox/

i read the terms and conditions and it says specifically you cannot post content that violates copyright, theres no ‘fair usage’ in an online service for storing files.

afaik it’s not a violation of copyright to store your personal backup wherever you want. As long as nobody else than you is able to access the files..

Why not get a Pogoplug and an external hard drive.

http://www.pogoplug.com

I have it, love it.

[quote comment=""]Why not get a Pogoplug and an external hard drive.

http://www.pogoplug.com

I have it, love it.[/quote]

$65 a year? A 500GB, 5400rpm SATA drive is $45. (SAMSUNG HD502HI). A USB2.0 to IDE/SATA interface is $20 (Sabrent USB-DSC5, the best $20 you will ever spend on your computer!) Uploading 100GB on my current DSL connection would take… (100*1024*1024) / (150 * 60 * 60 * 24) = 8.09 days of solid upload.

No thank you.

Thanks to everyone who has suggested alternate services and backup solutions. There are far too many online storage options to cover them all, and purpose of this was to get people thinking about and more importantly, ACTING to develop their own remote data recovery solutions.

These services and technologies are progressing rapidly, so it will be an ongoing conversation as to what type of solution and what service providers are best to use.

Regarding copyright law, it’s true that most of these services tell you outright or imply that you should not upload material that you don’t own the copyright for. However, they don’t really attempt to describe what constitutes copyright violation, and in the case of ADrive, it doesn’t say your account will be terminated unless “Adrive is advised of a court order, subpoena or notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) requiring removal of the Storage Data or any similar rule or regular of any other jurisdiction…”

Let’s be honest; no one is going to subpoena you or request that your data be removed if you are only using it for personal backup and not sharing it with anyone, which is what I would recommend. And how many customers would these companies have left if they actually expunged every client they had who was storing a commercially available music file?

I don’t want to expound too much on my own philosophy, but in the United States, anyone who has given a mixed tape or CD with copyrighted material on it to a friend is in violation of copyright law. So we’re dealing with a policy that is so bloated and unenforceable that it has made “criminals” of us all. Do you feel guilty for giving someone a mix CD? I don’t. And I don’t feel guilty about using online storage for a personal backup of copyrighted music either.

It’s everyone’s own choice to make, and I don’t advocate that anyone do anything they’re uncomfortable with. But to me, the risk of losing my music and other data without any remote backup possibilities is far greater than the miniscule risk of running into trouble for storing copyrighted material online for personal backup use.

Excelent article, I’ve been looking for something like this, so far I was using hotmail for my tracks but it’s only 25GB storage and the upload is quite slow, will use Mediafire free to back-up my collection, is more than enough. Thanks.

[quote comment="22663"]$65 a year? A 500GB, 5400rpm SATA drive is $45. (SAMSUNG HD502HI). A USB2.0 to IDE/SATA interface is $20 (Sabrent USB-DSC5, the best $20 you will ever spend on your computer!) Uploading 100GB on my current DSL connection would take… (100*1024*1024) / (150 * 60 * 60 * 24) = 8.09 days of solid upload.

No thank you.[/quote]

I have to agree. You can get a thumb drive with 16GB of storage that can fit on your keychain. That is more than enough storage to back up your essential files and music and its fits in your pocket. No upload, download, or need for an internet connection. I personally feel more secure with that.

Leo Laporte like carbonite. I haven’t used it, but I like Leo and, generally, the things he likes.

http://www.carbonite.com/

i just bookmarked this one today:

http://www.wuala.com/

You start with 1 GB of storage for free… then.

* 10 GB for 25 $
* 50 GB for 95 $
* 100 GB for 160 $
* 500 GB for 630 $
* 1 TB for 1000 $

[quote comment=""]i just bookmarked this one today:

http://www.wuala.com/

You start with 1 GB of storage for free… then.

* 10 GB for 25 $
* 50 GB for 95 $
* 100 GB for 160 $
* 500 GB for 630 $
* 1 TB for 1000 $[/quote]

Not to forget the possibility of trading storage. I am giving 20gb of my harddrive for wuala to store crypted fileparts on and in return i get 20gb x my Online time % for free.
Which means….whoever has got a pc running all day anway, its easy to ern thtat storage.
Been using this for over a year an its been working fine for me.
Another plus is that you can join together in groups so any projects can be stored on there.
Files can also be directly executed while beeing on Wuala (just for good internet connections)

so in reality even though u bought the music spend your own money …. eh u still don’t own that song ?? just doesn’t make sense damn laws.. just hope one of this days they don’t start charging you every time you play a song..hmmmm aren’t they doing that already ??

just buy a hard drive and save all your music there..

do these support hosting files or just storing files? i.e. if i upload to the site can i link to it and have people access them or is it mainly just storage?

While we are on the topic, if you purchase all your tracks from Beatport they will allow you to re-download them if you email them telling them that your hard drive has failed on you and that you have lost the tracks.

I wouldn’t rely on this as a backup, but it is very handy to know !

Some random input…

My sister spilled wine on my DJ rig. The only thing in the entire computer that got wrecked was the disk with my tunes on it. Luckily Beatport etc let me download the tunes again for free but setting up all those warp markers and re-remixing everything sucked. Obviously lots of my original stuff is gone forever.

USB sticks are great but diligence is required, they can loose data (yes they can) and they are easy to loose.

I started backing up the whole lot to Sugarsync mainly because it does a good job of uploading everything automatically. I tested downloading the backup the other day. A 60GB file took 19 minutes to download. At that rate 20GB would take 4.5 days download.

my setup.

I have a mac desktop at home and a macbook pro for mobile, my desktop is my main source so basically everything that my laptop has my desktop will have and my desktop is backed up 2 ways.

1. using time machine, i’ve overwritten crap time and time again with my design work so knowing that I can go back and just rescue that one file very quickly and easily is well worth it. Plus is it’s free with a mac.

2. I have another firewire drive where I keep archived backups of my stuff. So that I can go way back and get my stuff, plus I have my music files for production, vsts, software, settings, and of course and additional backup of my tunes.

I also use dropbox which is primo with the desktop app, and I drop in my track collection files that way if i update some beat markers or cue points on one it will update on the other machine.

Best of all my backup solutions are free, the only require HDD’s. As for storing stuff on the go, I just use my idisk, or flash drives, I have one clipped to my car keys, so there is no way I can get to a party without one. Diligence yes, but hey a good DJ is diligent.

My last bit of advice, BUY A GOOD HDD, don’t buy crap that is cheaper because it will die on you.

hey why not even buy a pogo plug, it gives u access to a backup of a hard drive anywhere, so buy the hard drive for on the road traveling and one for even further protection. you leave one at home connected to the pogoplug and always have access to it even though your not right next to it.

Here is an interesting thing : http://www.zumodrive.com has a feature that lets you have your itunes library in “the cloud”. The scenario shows netbook users with limited storage streaming their itunes collection. I was wondering if traktor would pickup this library information and show it under the itunes folder inside traktor.
check the demo link on their front page.

worth a try.

Rapidshare anyone?

[quote comment=""]Rapidshare anyone?[/quote]
+1 for Rapidshare…

I’m surprised Dropbox wasn’t mentioned. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and it’s quite spectacular. Speed is really fast too on the uploads and downloads!

Here’s a night mare story: finishing a gig, going with friends to restaurant because you know after a hard rocking night, you need to fill your stomach, 2 hours later getting back to my car, where I left my macbookpro, external hard drives, audio card, dongle key (with nexus), everything was in case cover so no body could know what was inside, my car trunk glass was smashed and they took everything. +4000 songs (legally bought), latest worked studios songs and 7 years of archived emails.

You can be sure that now I will get a NAS at home backing up all my files weekly + I’m installing an anti-theft device!

I find it mind boggling that at this day and age people STILL don’t physically backup their data and pay thousands of dollars for computer and music yet don’t spare a hundred to back it up. Online storage is an overall great idea, but, as it is, it unfortunately does not apply to my country due to the very limited speed of broadband connection.

Kinda off-topic, but here’s a little tip: I very often back up 1 GB of music + software to the microSD Card on my cellphone just in case.

well, I guggest u try DropBox.com.
basically, u create a folder on your computer and put everything u want in it and it will show up in other computers u have the DropBox application on.
2 GB is free and a 100GB is 19.99$ a month.
worth checking out

[...] DJ Tech Tools has a nice roundup of these services with a helpful summary of all their features. [...]

Mideafire is now 200 MB max file size :D

Psonar.com is a dedicated music backup service, when you have your tracks uploaded which takes only to install their software and set it to a folder or drive you have all your music in a media player’ type interface. You can then sync multiple computers or even transfer playlists etc to a portable mp3. Haven’t explored it all fully yet because currently I’m on Linux and the uploader is in alpha still but looks like a useful service.

Still love Dropbox though

The real problem here is upload speeds. I have a 150GB music library that I’d ideally like to keep in the cloud somewhere. However, to upload that amount of data is simply unfeasible, so I have a spare portable hard disk that I just use to backup the music library once in a while.

For downloading of files necessary for me I always choose Rapidshare. And for search in it – http://www.usemeplz.com

For downloading of files necessary for me I always choose Rapidshare. And for search in it – http://www.usemeplz.com

Check This Out…

[...]Here are some of the sites we recommend for our visitors[...]…

Sites We Like…

[...]just below, are some totally unrelated sites to ours, however, they are definitely worth checking out[...]…

Check This Out…

[...]Here are some of the sites we recommend for our visitors[...]…

I think for MediaFire, you need to at least log on to your account monthly or something; otherwise, they will delete your files…