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Hi Everyone,

My name is Dan Lueders and I write and produce Christian Children's music in the Chicagoland area. I'm a long time DP user but I am new to this group (cool!). I have probably lerned more about DP in the last week than I have over the past few years. THANK YOU!

My question this. Is anyone fimilar with the .Mac member incrimental Back up tool call, oddly enough, "Back Up"? If so, is it a data compression system? Does it preserve DP files?

Any help will be appreiated.

Merry Belated Christmas,

Dan

...?

Hi Dan, and welcome to the Nation of Unicorns.

Backing up your data properly and redundantly is very important.
I only recommend permanent back up to optical media. It's cheap and reliable IF done properly. Of course everyone has their way of doing things and I can only tell you what I do. And have never had a failure/loss except for one situation.

I BU to DVD twice. Three times would not be frowned upon however. One copy goes in a fire resistant safe and the other is stored on a shelf at the opposite end of the building. Mind you I'm in a big place and if a fire started in the middle it would be reported before it got to either end, hopefully.

The only failure I ever had was when I accidently set my format to ISO 9660. One disc was burned this way and DP won't recognize the truncated file names. I should be able to resurrect the project manually but thankfully I've never had to.

As far as .Mac goes, I would never trust it for exclusive BU. For temp storage or data transfer, I'm sure it's fine.

And I also drag ALL projects to an external drive on a regular basis as insurance. When I start to feel REALLY PaRaNoId I just do a rough burn of EVERYTHING important to a pile of DVD's. Can't hurt...

I don't know what other's experience with the .Mac stuff is, but all I can say is it's INCREDIBLY SLOW. You might be able to use it to backup a few meg of documents. When it comes to the big stuff, it takes forever. Same with iDisk. So slow, it's unusable (this is on high speed connections). I use 2 external firewire drives for backup - one for everything (bootable, including audio) and the other for audio exclusively. They are only connected to the computer and AC when doing backups (I've had a power surge from lightning take out multiple drives, now paranoia). When something is finished, it goes to CD/DVD (2 copies). External drives have gotten so inexpensive that it's worth it for the peace of mind and time savings.

The main problem with using .mac with Backup, is you have to maintain a .mac account to use it. If you (or Apple!) decide to discontinue the program, you can't launch Backup to restore your files.

You can use Backup on other media besides your idisk (external drives, DVD-r's), but for long-term storage, it's false security. Get a large hard drive and maintain copies, or go with Retrospect and use either tape or DVD-R's.

Thanks, I figured as much!