Now that might seem like a smug thing to say, but believe me I’ve had hard drive crashes on several occasions, the first time I tried spending £450 with a specialist recovery firm, only to get back half the data. They say a fool is not someone who makes a mistake, but one who keeps on making the same mistake. I think I’ve learned from my mistakes, read this and you can learn from my mistakes too.
So my Mac Pro started playing silly buggers about a week ago, it would freeze after about 45 minutes of use and the only thing that would bring it back was a hard restart. Then I went through all the apps and systems that could be causing it, starting with apps, then background processes and still no love.
Then I fired up Disk Warrior and it told me that my SSD had some serious issues that I could only fix by flattening it and starting from scratch. Now for some that would be the worst news in the world. Thankfully for me it wasn’t, here’s why.
I have two system drives on my Mac, one running the latest OS and the other an older trusty version. If one bombs then I have the second one I can boot to run any analytics, such as Disk Warrior.
I keep all my sample libraries, Pro Tools Sessions and the data components of any large products like Komplete Ultimate on other hard drives. So if I do have to reinstall apps I don;t have to reinstall the huge libraries they use. All my sessions are backed up to Gobbler, all my other personal stuff is in Dropbox, all my mail is on IMAP, so none of that is getting lost.
I use Super Duper and Carbon Copy Cloner to make back-ups of my drives so if the worst should happen then the worst hasn’t happened.
I keep all my installers on a spare drive, so should I need to reinstall all the Apps, then I don’t have to wait for huge downloads to complete before I’m up and running.
I use iLok for most of my plug-ins - you might hate iLok but they are my best friends, even if I had to buy a new machine then I could use all my plug-ins.
Now all of that is wisdom acquired from more bags of hurt than I care to recall. It has taken time for me to come to my senses regarding good storage, labelling and back-up policies. Some of the software I have mentioned is not free, but the alternative of me spending hours, if not days, trying to get my computer and data back from the dead makes my investment pay for itself a hundred times over.
Take my advice, learn from my mistakes and never have the worst happen, even when it does!