Where should I back up my music projects?

The short answer to this is ‘in as many places as possible,’ but as a guide, we’d recommend that, if you value your work, you should have it stored in at least three locations. Don’t – whatever you do – have a hard drive full of music projects that isn’t backed up anywhere: should the disk fail or you lose your machine for some reason, you’ll be up slack alley.

Cloud storage services are an attractive option, particularly as these enable you to access your work from anywhere. That said, we always like to keep hard backups of our projects as well – external hard drives are now so cheap that there’s really no excuse not for doing it.

There’s also a third option: products such as Western Digital’s My Cloud give you the convenience of online storage, but actually keep the backups on a personal drive.

Ultimately, though, the method of backing up is less important than actually doing it – and don’t forget about all those burnt CDs and DVDs of your projects that you’ve got lying around. There’s always a risk that these could fail, too, so make sure their contents are safe too.