Is It Possible to Make Disaster Recovery Copies?

You can remove the picture cache data completely and Sonar will just regenerate it. In fact that's one way to get rid of corrupted data and start fresh. You can also choose to re-compute pictures from within Sonar.
 
The Wave data folder won't contain anything important if you've saved into per-project folders. All your wave data is in the folders.
 
File management is actually one of my favorite aspects of Sonar thanks to auto-save, per-project folders, The ability to export all tracks as individual files that last the duration of the song (with or without attributes like automation), BWF stamping, and bundles for making quick temp backups on USB thumb drives. Just give me a big hard drive and a Blu-Ray burner, and I'm a happy guy.
 
 

...wicked
Yah what he said. THe easiest way is to just do a Save As and copy the audio data over to a different drive. 
 
The ONE thing I wish SONAR did was actually hard save the synth patches. It "remembers" settings but if you have a total system meltdown and for whatever reason (there's many) a reinstalled synth doesn't get recognized as itself, you're hosed. Once you've got all audio you're golden. But synth patches and plugins? Ugh.

Sonar has very robust sys ex storage. Before the days of virtual instruments, you could save data from all your synths, processors, etc. - anything that produced system exclusive data - as a sys ex dump and send it back into your devices at any time.
 
However...there's a somewhat equivalent function for virtual devices, which by a most curious coincidence, was going to be the subject for tomorrow's tip of the day. But I'll post it later today instead.

lawajava
I keep a rotation of different external drives I have the backups on, because if you only back up to one external drive even that can fail.

All good advice, to which I would add that when I back up to optical storage, I save to at least two discs from different manufacturers. That way if there's a bad production run of discs I'll have an alternative.

The best way is to copy the files per xcopy to another drive:
xcopy /s /e /v /c /r /d /y f:\project1 x:\
 
for all Projects:
xcopy /s /e /v /c /r /d /y f:\*.* x:\
 
Make this as a batchfile (*.bat).
We do this since over ten years for over 1000 Projects.

...wicked
Yah what he said. THe easiest way is to just do a Save As and copy the audio data over to a different drive. 
 
The ONE thing I wish SONAR did was actually hard save the synth patches. It "remembers" settings but if you have a total system meltdown and for whatever reason (there's many) a reinstalled synth doesn't get recognized as itself, you're hosed. Once you've got all audio you're golden. But synth patches and plugins? Ugh.
 

I've gotten into the habit of saving all of my synth settings as presets in their own folder in the project directory. You never know what could go wrong and there is NOTHING worse than losing that awesome Prism patch you spent the best part of 2 months tweaking to perfection.

As for back ups I am pretty sold on the whole Gobbler backup system. I don't even have to think about it now, all my projects are backed up whenever I save them, and I can very easily revert back to any version should I need to. It's amazing.

THambrecht
The best way is to copy the files per xcopy to another drive:
xcopy /s /e /v /c /r /d /y f:\project1 x:\
 
for all Projects:
xcopy /s /e /v /c /r /d /y f:\*.* x:\
 
Make this as a batchfile (*.bat).
We do this since over ten years for over 1000 Projects.

This is from the DOS days for those that don't get it.

Ha, Ha!

"xcopy" works in all Windows OSes.
A Newer command (Windows 7 and higher) is "robocopy".
It's a command in the shell.
Every admin or poweruser makes use of it.
You can do things with this command you can never do with the explorer.
For example writing a batch-script - and with one click of a desctop icon you can save all projects to an external drive or a network-drive.
 
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/xcopy.mspx?mfr=true
 
Write as a textfile withe the ending ".bat"
 

I have a Robocopy running daily from one drive to another.  I have a MyDocuments folder (that contains all my VST plugs/synths) on drive F: and all my Projects/audio on drive S:.  My Robocopy copies from S:->F: and also F:->S:.  That way if either drive dies, I have the contents of the other.  It's at the expense of space, but I have plenty of it on both drives.
 
If I were really paranoid, I'd copy off to an external location with a system like Crashplan or whatever. 
 
Speaking of, Crashplan has a free backup application that works for local drives and for a small monthly fee ($10 for the business plan), you can back up a single machine with unlimited files.  In my case, ifI were really worried about having an off-site copy, I'd just run my Robocopies over a VPN to the office server, where Crashplan is running.
 
Here's an example of one of the lines from my scheduled .cmd file:
 

robocopy s:\cake_files f:\audbackup\Cake_Files_Backup *.*  /e /COPY:DAT /r:0 /w:0 /LOG:s:\robocake.log

 
This says to backup all files in the s:\cake_files directory to the f:\audbackup\Cake_Files_Bakup folder, include empty folders, copy all of the security info and such with them, do no read or write retries and write a log file called robocake.log in the root of the s: drive.
 
Robocopy itself is now included in the Windows 8, otherwise, you may need to download it for your version of Windows.
 
Hope this helps someone.