Do You Have a Plan for this Nightmare Scenario?

Have you ever had your world come crashing down on you? When you feel a pit in the bottom of your stomach and feel a little helpless?

No, I’m not talking about love or relationships. This is an entirely different level: your hard drive crashes on you during the middle of a project! 

I have had to deal with this several times over the years. If you’ve been burned, hopefully you took action to make sure the aftermath wasn’t as bad.

By the way, if you haven’t already, you can sign up to receive free mixing and recording tips and tricks at rockmixingengineer.com

Let’s start with this fact: all disk drives fail. It may be 5 years from now or it may be in a few hours, but it’s going to happen. Physical parts wear out or heat destroys them. If you notice in the fine print with drives it usually tells you approximately how long it should last.

About 2 weeks ago I had my system drive in my Mac die on me. This was an SSD drive. Silly me for thinking maybe since they have no moving parts it might last longer. Wrong! They only can take so many read/writes and then they fail. 

Sometimes when a drive fails you’ll get some warning. Maybe some sectors start going bad or you get some errors that spring you into action to buy a new drive. With my SSD it was working one second and the next it showed nothing on the drive. Armageddon basically.

So here is what I’ve done in the past to prepare for this moment that made this slightly less painful. I’ll also tell you what I did wrong and will be improving upon in my backup process.

For starters, I’ve been using Backblaze for years. It stores a copy of ALL your drives on the server. So, I do have a backup up of my dead SSD. Usually with this backup programs they will only store your data. They won’t backup applications, so you’ll have to reinstall those.

So Pro Tools sessions, wave files, presets, etc. are always being backed up.

To get a free trial of Backblaze click here.

I also backup to a large capacity external drive. For really important projects I highly recommend have 2 or 3 backups in different locations. Does that seem like overkill? It’s not.

The first thing I did was go to Backblaze and create a restore zip file. It contains all the files you pick in the exact directory structure that was on the failed drive. It’s not in any weird format either. It’s your files in their natural state.

When the file is ready to be downloaded use their downloader software.  It allows pausing and resuming. My first download was too big and failed. Then I noticed they had a downloader.  It worked great.

I’ve got Backblaze setup to run late at night so it doesn’t interrupt my workflow. I may have it set to do smaller backups in the background during day hours. I can’t remember to be honest. Whatever the case, it chugs along in the background and you never think about it, until the day you need to.

When this drive went down I took an external hard drive and tried to make it a boot drive. Macs let you boot in ‘restore mode.’  When you do this some options come up like Disk Utility (so you can format a drive or partition it), connect to the internet, and restore from backup.

My Mac came preloaded with Mavericks (OS). Basically they’ve got got it setup so it will get you online and restore to that old operating system. This would be alright, but once you’re able to get to the desktop you can’t update to Catalina or Big Sur. You can’t even update to several versions before those.

This is because it shows an error when you try to update saying the drive is not formatted correctly. Apparently from what I’ve Googled lots of people have this issue. Insert conspiracy theory here.

Long story short, In addition to Backblaze, I will be using the Mac’s built in Time Machine software going forward. It supposedly is making a carbon copy of your system drive. When you are in the restore mode I spoke about above you can choose to restore from that Time Machine backup. 

What I’ve noticed before about these type of disk failures is that there is usually a lot of junk on my system that I really don’t need. So when I’m reinstalling everything I take the time to prune my plugins and apps down to what I actually use. If there is a silver lining it’s that and the fact that you get a freshly installed OS which is always nice and fast.

Until next time…

— — — — — —

If you haven’t already, make sure you sign up for my email list.  I offer exclusive content, discounts and other goodies for my subscribers. Go to rockmixingengineer.com to subscribe. You’ll also get a free guide on recording heavy guitars and a sneak peak at my new recording course The Sound Visualization Method.

Also, in case you didn’t know, I mix singles, EPs, and Albums for Rock and Metal bands. You can check out my work and get more info at mattclarkmixer.com/secdir/ as well as get prices, etc.

— — — — — —

Need more fans? Download your free funnel and start building your list today.

Uncategorized

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *