When Did You Last Back Up Your Most Important DJ Files?

For the digital DJ, data is everything; traditionally DJs have worked exclusively with physical vinyl or CDs to a lesser extent. The physical vinyl is durable and difficult to lose. Today, most DJs are 100% reliant on ‘virtual’ tracks, mixes, project files and so on with no physical presence.

Pretty much everything you need to enable you to do what you do is invisible or floating around virtually somewhere behind the scenes, chances are you spend way more time finding, organising and preparing music than you actually spend performing.

In which case, what would happen if you lost the whole thing in an instant?

It is the ultimate doomsday scenario, which thankfully does not play out for most DJs. But for those who do fall victim to catastrophic data loss, the consequences can be…well, even more catastrophic.

The heart and soul of your entire DJ world is stored in digital format. Quite literally, everything you need to put on a set and being able you to do your job. For any number of reasons, you could suddenly find yourself with the whole job lot gone. It could be that your hard drive has been fried, your computer has been stolen or you lost it at some point along the way.

It is at this point you will find yourself staring one of two scenarios in the face:

1. You previously backed up everything of importance to you, and so have a convenient fall-back option to avoid Armageddon.

2. You never bothered to back anything up as you assumed it would never happen to you, and now you need to start again from scratch.

Given the fact that backing up your files as a digital DJ is not particularly difficult, only one of these scenarios makes sense. You rarely have to look far to find a DJ who will happily share horror stories of having lost half their worldly data.

Bottom Line: Back Up Often

Getting into the habit of backing things up at least once a month is an absolute must; in terms of what exactly needs backing up, you should be looking to create at least a couple of additional copies of your music libraries, your project files, your hardware and software settings.

Keeping an online backup of your files using some kind of paid virtual drive is advisable. This way, you will always have access to everything you need if the worst should happen, irrespective of where you are at the time.

Physical backups should also be kept on external hard drives and USB sticks of the highest possible quality. Avoid any cheap unbranded garbage that is more likely to end up corrupting your files than get you out of a pinch when needed.

It is also worth taking the time to defragment your music drive and check it for errors. You will find all the disk utility tools you need built into the disc, so use them. This can significantly reduce the risk of data loss or corruption happening in the first place.