Just a note to every one............
My PC has finally upped and died!!!!!!
Taking EVERYTHING WITH IT!!!!!!!
Dust to Dust .....silicon chip to sand!!!!!
As you can imagine Im devastated...................all previous and any work in progress and cubase files gone!!!!

Maybe this thread could expand on the benefit of external back up............

I had just got my head around writing songs again!!!!

But there is a silver lining............

I have a new PC being built!!!!!
and I've finally ditched old and unstable and dodgy DAW software and invested in Protools LE (that promises me a stable working platform and 0% latency) 

I think Im going to lose the ability to use FL Studio as a plug in ????

There will Be a learning curve .................

But I feel like might be going to a better place...........

Distressed FISH

That sucks. But Protools sounds really fancy. Good luck.
This has actually happened to me a few time..sad times..but on one instance I was able to recover most of my work!!

Sh*t, dude!
That's my biggest fear in life, I guess: that by PC crashes or is stolen and I lose all my music and stuff like that. That would make me commit suicide or something. Is not that I depend on a PC but I depend on my music and losing that is like losing a part of my life.
I feel really really sorry for this. One more reason to start backing up... but it's so long and boring!

             > Iszil

Shit Happens      
Every Cloud has a Sliver lining, so they say -  I've been told down the Grape Vine that ProTools is EXCELLENT for Audio.

So Might be a blessing in Disguise  

Bummer.....is it the actual hard drive that's gone? Up till last week I would have said you can always retrieve info from a HD but I had one just crunch on me completely...cant access it from any system.
But I'd still advise trying out a program like R-Studio (I torrented mine). If the HD is not too formatted and still works then stick it in a new system as a slave and your Recovery program should find most of your files.  

But as for a blessing in disguise... yes most definitely .... out with the old on with the new

If the HD is too formatted you'll get an insane amount of text files and you'll need a new system just to open the folder, that's what I got once after a HD crash but luckily I was looking for HTML page I had written. I did find it back...in fragments and had to 'rebuild' it.

Ah Hem! But also a lesson to you Swordy................


          Dont delete your music from bandAmp !!!!!

Funny innit? The two people I know on bandamp who've gone deleting music from their accounts have also had mad system crashes also loosing the music they have at home.  Life is strange

I bought an external hardrive from ebay for a reasonable amount of money, I back up all my music on that, I think you can set it up so that it backs up automatically, someone must know here on the AMP how to do that?

I use a synchronization function in NExplorer, it's a stupid old explorer program but I just liked the way it worked, I've tried other specific synch programs but most of them date folders or leave files everywhere...which I'm not into.
The best way is to get two SATA drives and set it up with RAID...ask toasty, it's how he does it.
You can also write a very small .bat file with a command line in it to back up the folders you specify in the bat file, and putting an S (silent) in the command line will do it all in the background...anyway if you want to know go look for it...it is a good way of doing it.

I finally got a 2T external hard drive..External HD's are not all that expensive now.  I used to run a raid set up for mirror (back up the main drive)..Since I have the external HD  I  now use a once a week all file back up (set up automatically)  it  backs up all files to a specific partition I have set up on the external HD.. My music projects I manually save in two places.. One on the C drive (which is actually 4 hard drives running as one), The 2nd manual back up is to the F drive (main partition) of my external hard drive. 

 I learned a valuable lesson on back ups last year.. I got complacent about it because the computer was working well... My Hard Drive (not the cpu) crashed .. I took it to someone that said they could pull the files out.  They couldn't ..when it crashed it did a number on the disk. (according to the tech). 

 So after all that wordy stuff.. imho  Get external HD.. set it up to back up you system and file automatically , and  take the time to manually backup your important files immediately ( I save mine to two locations)

How you set up your internal HD's is up to you.. If you don't have external HD I'd probably set mine up to Mirror the main drive.. If you have external HD.. I'd probably set mine up for striping. (speed).

Mr Fish - too late to say "why have you not backed up your files?"
But feeling sorry for you, so I won't rub it in.
I invested in a pretty decent sized USB external HDD last year; a sinch to use - and saves no end of heartache.
They're so cheap now (1TB for about £70) - just do it!

Interested to hear how you get on with ProTools - never used it, but seen a few comments about it being the bizo.

TTFN
Jim AC