Backup your Serato MP3 collection.

Its pretty obvious, isn’t it?

Make sure you have your Serato MP3 library and crates backed up, as often as possible. Its pretty obvious, but as this relatively stupid DJ found out - its not compulsory, and people often forget. When people forget to do such obvious things, sods law will dictate that said persons will come a cropper. Especially if these people are not only stupid, but also, pretty unlucky.

(Yes, I forgot).

A few months ago, I lost half my MP3 library…well…technically I didn’t, but I lost the latest, super cleaned up well categorised and tagged version. Days of work up in smoke because I deleted the wrong drive, and very stupidly did not have a back up. After spending an unjustifiable amount of time to get back to where I had already been, I thought that a really good backup solution was needed. I started to look around and pieced together something that works for me, based on my existing Serato setup, and how I like to use computers. You can find more about how I set up my MP3 collection, or how I setup and optimised my laptop for Serato if you want to, they are both pretty relevant to what you are about to read.

There are three parts to backing up a collection; backing up your collection for playing out with you, backing up your collection locally at home, and backing up your collection more permanently on the net (or some form of secure storage). I will cover all three, but as my Serato is PC based, many of the things I mention will only work on a PC. If anyone knows of any mac equivalents, please mail me and I will update the relevant section.

It might seem overkill to some to go into this level of detail - but its taken me years to build what I have. Take from this what you can.

Backing up your collection for playing out

I take my Serato collection out with me on a USB drive. Everything is stored on the drive - the crates, the mp3’s, all the Serato information. This works for me for a whole host of reasons that I don’t need to go into here (they are covered in other articles on this site), but it does cause problems. If I leave the drive at home, I’m screwed. If the USB drive breaks, I’m screwed. If the laptop I use fails to recognise the USB drive - I am screwed. Believe it or not, two out of those three have happened to me in the past, and I have been screwed, but maybe that’s just my luck.

Assuming that you also use a USB drive for your Serato collection, there are two things you can do here (or both, if finance is not a problem). Firstly, put a copy of all your MP3 files onto a partitioned drive on the laptop. Mimic the same structure as you have on your USB, copying everything over but the Serato crate files. If you copy these over as well, when you open up Serato (and have your USB drive plugged in) it will think there are two identical libraries and load them both - leaving you with two copies of each track, which doesn’t sound too bad but is a pain in the arse in reality. Taking a copy of just the main MP3 folder structure that you have means that if the worst happened and your USB drive failed, you could at least drag these files into new crates quickly…and hey presto, entertained party-goers.

The second thing is simple - buy a second USB drive and take out an exact copy of your main drive. You can even copy all the Serato files over with this so you can have the same crate structure as soon as you plug it in. The chances of both drives failing or being left at home are pretty slim. Its the best choice if you can afford it. The only drive I would consider getting is the Lacie Rugged USB drive. Its brilliant - you could drive a tank over the thing and it would still work. Had a full pint spilled on one recently and it didn’t even flinch. Most USB drives I have had in the past break when I am taking them out of the packaging, so this really made a difference. The only downside is splashing out £140 for 2 drives (£70 each). I haven’t been able to afford that yet, but one day, I’m sure I will.

Backing up your collection at home

Once your ok for taking your stuff out, its important to make sure you are backed up at home. I looked at quite a few packages that would backup files automatically to different locations, including other network drives and media like CD and DVD. I wanted something that would only backup files I had changed, and not copy the entire lot over each time (as that means each backup would take forever). As I usually only remember to back stuff up at the last minute (IE. ten minutes before I am taking my drives out), something that takes hours to backup was not going to work for me. After running through a number of freeware packages, which were all pretty so-so, I found KLS Backup 2007 - a program that I had to buy, but it was worth every penny. A quick look on the site shows me that there is a new version out (KLS Backup 2008 funnily enough), and that it has gone up slightly in price to $59.95 (about £30 by current exchange rate). I don’t know what the new features are, because I haven’t upgraded…but I am going to take an educated guess that they haven’t removed anything, and that KLS backup 2008 gives me all the same features of 2007 (with nicer icons no doubt).

Basically - it does everything. I wanted to be able to set up a job that would auto backup from my USB drive as soon as I plugged it into the main PC. KLS does this, and will synchronise the files rather than just straight backing them up. This means that if all I have changed from the last backup is 10 or 20 files, it only backs these files up, rather than taking the whole lot over again (which as I have mentioned could take hours). As long as I make sure that my files are backed onto different drives I have in my PC (and they are currently backed onto 3 different drives), I can be reasonably comfortable knowing that not all three of my main PC drives will fail at the same time. I mean, what are the chances of that happening. Hmm.

Because there is still a slim chance that would happen, say my little girl accidentally poured water into my computer, or I spilled a full beer on it, or a power surge, or…well because there is that chance, its also advisable to backup onto some kind of standard media. KLS will backup onto CD/DVD as well, although I just did a backup using Nero (any CD/DVD writer will do). Get a Dual Layer DVD writer - they are stupidly cheap now - a quick look on dabs shows one for £17, and you can find cheaper no doubt. With dual layer you can write 8GB to one single disk. My collection currently weighs in at about 20Gb, so three disks and I have everything backed up in hard copy, and hard copy never fails. Unless you get robbed. Or there’s a fire. Or crap on the disk. Or…

Backing up your collection to permanent storage

The last piece of the puzzle, and probably the least needed - but by far the most secure, is to find a backup solution that enables you to keep your files stored on an external server; maybe on the Internet, or shared storage space.

There are a million websites that do this, and many of them are free. Microsoft, for example, have the Microsoft Skydrive - an online storage solution that is free to all Windows Live users. BT have the Digital vault, that is free to users of BT broadband, and there are many web 2.0 (gah) sites that have storage as the main selling point - box.net, allmydata, amazonwebservices (you can find a very well compiled list of storage solutions here)…but they all seem to come with the same limitations. 5GB maximum storage, all files must be transferred by hand (not synchronised automatically), pay for extra 5GB chunks, wont host MP3’s, and so on.

I knew I would have to pay for a service, just because I wanted more than most of the free sites were offering…but I wanted to pay as little as possible (of course) and also, for my money, get synchronisation as part of the deal. Then, just like on my home system, only the files that need to be transferred (ie. the ones that are new or have changed) will be fired across cyberspace. This is essential - because synchronising a large number of files up to a server on the Internet is just about the slowest thing you can do. No matter what your download speed, your upload speed is *usually* pathetic. Mine, for example, on an 8mb BT land line is taking about 14 hours to transfer 1GB. When you have 20Gb to get through, you don’t really want to have to do all that by hand each time, or it would take about 2 weeks. Which is rubbish.

I found what I was looking for with a site I had used in the past that had clearly undergone a refit. Idrive gave me 150GB of storage space for $5 a month (or $50 if I sign up for a year). it also has a tool that will allow you to auto synchronise certain folders up to the web, and it can run permanently so as soon as you change those folders on your local PC it starts working, shooting things up to the server (slowly). Perfect really. I don’t know of another site that will do the same for the price, but one may exist, so hunt around (and please let me know). I wont go into the in’s and out’s of Idrive here, I will just say that the software was pretty easy to use, and everything worked first time, as you would expect.

Summary

This is probably the geekiest article I have ever written. Ive spent a whole night of my life collecting my thoughts on how best to backup a bunch of files so then you don’t lose them. Writing it at some points, I felt that surely there is no one in the world who wants to know this stuff at this level. But really, there should be. Lets look at vinyl - there are articles in magazines, on sites, in books…all related to how best to look after and store your vinyl. There are complete solutions, products, and businesses that are founded on this alone. I am not saying that an MP3 is nearly as valuable or personal as vinyl; we know that’s not the case. Having that tune to play at the right time, no matter what the format, certainly is, and as I use Serato, my MP3’s should now be treated with just the same love as my boxes of records.

I know that now I have everything backed up, i can never lose anything. Unless of course there is some kind of global catastrophe. But what are the chances of that happening?