Update: Backing Up Is For Nerds And The Paranoid

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I like to personally apologize for that lack of updates during the past week. As some of our Twitter followers may know, Crate Kings ran into major technical issues last Thursday? evening. Essentially, in a matter of hours we had to change web hosts and implement a number of software updates and security measures.

Though blog readers may not have been aware of any issues, regular forum visitors have definitely noticed a change in appearance. While the forums do not currently look the same, I can assure you that this is temporary situation and that no posts or other data was lost. Yes, unlike this unlucky guy, we have full backups and even backups of backups.

Please bear with Crate Kings while full site functionality is both restored and improved. While you’re at it, please take a moment to backup your work. You won’t regret it.

Sincerely,

Semantik

14 thoughts on “Update: Backing Up Is For Nerds And The Paranoid”

  1. word up, back up your stuff people. I lost so much music and personal stuff from not backing up my drives.

    good luck get this back and running.

  2. Yes.. very important.

    I stick to hardware these days when it comes to beats / recording / mixing, but I lost years worth of music and beats back when i used pc and the hd went.

    I also lost all my holiday photos, 4 trips to spain, 1 to italy, 2 to new york (im in uk so far to travel)… that was alot of photos / memories to loose, such a shame.

    Technology especially where storage is concerned is too unreliable, its very important to back up

  3. Hehehe. Nice cross over to Ryan Leslie! 🙂
    I expected an weird an obscure story about an even more weird and obscure individual.

    Time Machine is running and backing up every edit automatically. Easy.

  4. f’ing hard drives

    I have a hard drive, a Seagate Free Agent Pro 250 Gig – had all of my pictures of my daughter on there as a infant, only would plug it in to do back up and then I’d put it away – tried to boot it up last week and that thing won’t even power up – looked all over google, I’m basically going to have to take apart the casing and pull the drive and use a hard drive dock to extract the files – so lame

      • Me too. Started buying a bunch of little flash drives & keeping them all over the place so it would never happen again. You can’t be too careful.

      • Same. I’ve had two backup hard drives crash. The first time, I was inconsolable. The second time, I figured it was an act of God and just started again from scratch. Kind of cathartic, though.

    • I’ve lost backup harddrives too, but I’ve been lucky enough not to lose anything important. That and the great Crate Kings crash of 2008 was enough to make me super paranoid about backups though.

      Now my home setup has Time Machine backing up to a a 1TB physical harddrive and essential files (pics and documents) automatically backed up to Amazon S3, which is pretty cheap and highly recommended. They offer a free tier that gives 5 GB of cloud storage free for a year. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

      If you count the Dropbox folder, I’ve got triple backups of the most important stuff.

  5. I use Serato for DJing, and I have about 300GB of music. The amount of time that went into collecting and managing all that music is ridiculous and I can’t even imagine losing it all and start from scratch.

    I got a main external that I use, and 3 back-ups! I bring 2 HDDs to gigs. It may sound like I an overdoing it, but better save than sorry.

  6. I have A Lacie Drive Seems Like everytime I am Focus and make the hottest beats it crashes on me

  7. Some solutions to prevent some evil situations:

    1) use a Linux Knoppix Live System from CD for surfing – it only runs inside the RAM of the PC – after
    turning off your computer all surfing data is lost – no traces can be found – even when someone breakes in into your PC while being online ,after a reboot his trojan horses and so on are gone forever …

    2) use a Debian Linux System with LUKS encryption, here the whole operating system is encrypted, not only a partition, you can store all your private data here. The only thing which is not encrypted is the boot partition which has just a few MB to boot the encrypted harddrive

    3) make 2 or 3 backups, not only one, and encrypt them as well with LUKS

    4) if you have only encrypted partitions but the operating system itself is not encrypted then use Secure Deletion Software to delete private data ( files, pictues, texts etc. ) – otherwise it can be restored easy – if you delete a file only the iNode of the file is delete, the indication for the Operating System where the file is but the file itself is there with all its data – only Secure Deletion with 35 overwrites can do that job

    5) use strong passphrases, short or weak passwords ( these who are in dictionaries ) can be cracked within minutes and seconds – a strong password has 20 signs and more and can not be found in a dictionary – if you store such stuff online, then the third party which hosts your data could make brute force attack to open this stuff which means:

    6) from my experience and knowledge: dont store your stuff online, these people can also give your stuff to the government and agencies if the want some stuff and have your IP – online is a bad solution believe it or not. They probably have brute forece computers to crack encrypted stuff or at least to try it.

    7) dont collect personal emails, delete them after reading, such stuff collected over years and in the wrong hands can expose a lot over your life and people connected to you – but you can encrypt your emails as well with GnuPG for example

    there is probably lots of more to mention .. but this is a little start to become more secure today …

    Have fun people!

  8. Doing a backup to another drive is important, but additionally.. Keep a backup somewhere off-site too, so if a fire breaks out or someone steals the on-site backup drive you won´t lose a chance at doing a restore. 100 bucks for an extra hard drive to do this, can and will probably save your ass someday. Also, don´t hook the drive up to any system that may have spyware or viruses on it. I am using Xubuntu (a distro of Linux that is very easy to install), and while it took a couple days to get everything set right… I can do EVERYTHING that I would use a Windows system for, looks nicer, runs faster and more stable, and I even have REAPER working great under WINE. Add in the fact, that I can get all types of excellent applications for it easily, free, and legitimately…. I forget rather quickly that I am not even using Windows any longer. Oh and, HFS+ partitions (Mac OSX partitions), are read and write capable with a small amount of work. Took me a couple hours, but I can fully access the USB hard drive with such a partition in use (HFS+).

  9. I just recently backed up all my samples, beats, session files, etc. online just in case because I have lost information in the past (it sucks). Adrive.com gives you 50 gigs free and there are some other good ones out there as well.

  10. I actually figured out a way to get my info back (hopefully) – gotta get the drive out of the portable case and load it into a drive dock – I have a buddy that’s going to help me out

    can’t wait for solid state drives – no moving parts!

    btw, when is some company going to get it together and make a MPC style machine that can pull samples off of a generic flash drive without having to haul around a computer? the technology is there, they just need to do it – something where you format the flash drive so that the machine reads it – you could even have synth patches on the same principle

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