... but isn't it the problem with this system that if corruption has crept into your file which doesn't manifest itself for 20 minutes or so, your diligent regular saving has written that corruption into all of your backup files?
Yes and this is the problem with all kinds of backup. Let's leave Logic for a while and think about backup itself. Here is the complete catalogue of questions a system administrator will (or should) ask you when you want him do make backups:
1. How much data?
2. How often?
3. What is the retention time?
4. Which media?
5. How easy to recover?
Questions 1+2 can be answered by the user. Questions 4+5 may let room for user wishes or, with big amounts of data, are determined by technical possibilities.
The important question is number 3, the retention time. Backup is all about retention time. Many backups with short retention time can produce huge amounts of data but they are good for situations where you say, "oops, I should not have saved this!". These backups are preferably in the working area but you want to restrict the numbers of backups or your disk will fill up quickly.
Medium retention time is what a usual backup system has. You keep a set of recent versions, for example daily backups for one week, and rotate the backup sets to get the retention time you need. Can be a couple of days, weeks or months, depending on the application.
Long retention times can be months or years, handled in a similar manner as the medium times. Archiving has the longest retention time, in some cases indefinitely when you copy your data regularly to new media.
---
Ok, back to Logic. The program itself provides backups with short retention time. This is fine for the "oops" cases but no parachute for every situation. We have to make the other kinds of backups ourselves and we need a system for that.
One method is to save the whole project regularly under a new name. Depending on your personal preference you can store these mid-term backups in some other location, just to have them, or you continue to work with the newest version after you saved it. The latter is more logical but you definitely need a backup for the older versions or you might lose everything with a disk crash or another catastrophe like faulty I/O processes which produce data garbage (the "damaged project" is such a case).
Starting with the Leopard operating system, the second method for us is Time Machine. It may replace the mid-term backup via project copies but this is your own decision. Since making music is a creative process, you probably don't think in days and hours when you need a backup but rather remember certain versions of your pieces.
So, for short and medium retention times, we have Logics automatic backup, Time Machine and the manual project backup that fits somewhere between and is fully under our control. The clue is to make the three methods well-balanced. Once we understand the whole problem, balancing is quite easy because the computer has no idea about music, it just copies single bits without knowing what they mean. We know about our music and
can make manual project copies at strategic points.
The long-term backup is done by Time Machine or a similar system, for archiving you go to DVDs.
---
I would say a good method is to save very often, set the automatic Logic backup to 50 or 100 versions and save important project states as new projects to another disk. The other reliable method is to work always on the newest version and backup old versions.
In any case: Employ a (preferably external) Terabyte disk and let Time Machine run all the time! It's nevertheless called "Time Machine" and not "Sometimes Machine"
😉
