Backup hard drives: how many?

Yep, back up your back up, at least one off site cloud and one on site.
After google fiber was down I once again realized you need to have a combination because stuff happens.

Writable DVD’s aren’t a long term storage option. I’d get away from that as quickly as you can.

For short term "I hope my drive doesn't crater before I finish this project" backups, I back up to one drive that's always mounted and ready to back up to. All current projects that I've worked on that day get backed up at end of day - or sometimes even mid-day.

When stuff is done, I back up to two other drives that I keep on site, in storage.

For catastrophic purposes - like a fire or robbery, etc., I try to keep one backup off site as well. But since it's off-site, I don't get that one backed up too often.

I also back up my boot drive and sample library drives. Not as often though.....


I gave up on optical media quite a while ago. I've found hard drives much more reliable than CD/DVDR media.

But seriously, I'd say two drives. It's increasingly hard to tell when things are going to fail these days. I've had hard drives fail within days, or after 10 years. Sometimes they blink out in an instant and never turn back on, sometimes they start having errors and die slowly..

DVD's aren't the worst option. Back when CD-R and DVD-R were the new thing, there was a crusade by certain folks (HDD manufacturers most often) who simply poo-poo'd using any writable discs due to their weaknesses, but there was a lot of testing by various institutions and individuals that came up with certain criteria for excellent writable media archive solutions.. Namely the type of dye being used and the exposure to certain external forces like sunlight. There are absolutely "archive quality" writable disc media that are guaranteed to outlive you that have come from decades now of knowledge.

Most of the time it's as simple as using a higher quality disc, keeping it out of sunlight and hot places and it'll likely outlive your HDD's..

But today I still use multiple HDD's as my backup choices.

namely I use a 1TB WD black drive and a 2TB WD green. I have a 2TB WD blue for random stuff as well. My machines use Intel and Samsung SSD's as well as older Seagate and WD black drives. Haven't had any issues in 15+ years thankfully.

I mainly stopped doing DVD's because my session files were too big and spanning discs and burning took way too long.

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