I want to make sure recordings and settings I make going forward are portable from system to system and that they are able to be restored, long-term.
 
In particular, I'm concerned about a few things being stored in a way that I can easily bring them to a new system when I upgrade or after rebuilding in the event of a serious crash.  Another scenario is having multiple installations (eg.  laptop and desktop) that I want to keep in sync.  What's the easiest way to keep the configurations in sync with regard to the following:
 
- track templates, layouts, fx chains, etc
- key bindings, other system-wide customizations (color schemes)
- vst settings (per project - how do I ensure the patch settings are brought back on a fresh install of a plugin used in a project?)
 
I've tried searching on the forum and largely came up emtpy (I'm sure I'm searching for the wrong terms or something else).  I think this information is out there, maybe just spread far and wide.  I'm willing to try to get it compiled into a single place so that it may help others but I could use some pointers on best practices for saving the above so that it is most portable.  If I've missed an existing resource, could you kindly point me toward it?
 

Here is what I do. I back up the following folders:

All contents of paths referenced in the preferences | Folder locations
All contents of the paths referenced in the preferences | VST settings
Your %userprofile% folder
Your %ProgramData% folder
your %ProgramFiles% folder
your %ProgramFiles(x86)% folder

With what ever backup solution you use, you need the ability to restore individual files.

To capture your settings, I put the following commands in a CMD script.  This gets run at the same time as the backup. There are more settings in my actual script, but this gives you an idea of the command structure.

regedit /e "Sonar local machine.reg" "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Cakewalk Music Software"
regedit /e "Sonar Platinum all preferences.reg" "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cakewalk Music Software\SONAR\Platinum"

There are individual components that can also backed up,  these will be under the  HKCU\Software\Cakewalk Music Software\SONAR\Platinum key

For instance, the key bindings are as follows:

regedit /e "Sonar Platinum keybindings.reg" "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cakewalk Music Software\SONAR\Platinum\Bindings"

The handy part of this method is that the generated reg files only need to be double clicked on to restore those particular settings.

I have recently upgraded from Windows 7 64bit ENT to Windows 10 64bit Pro Retail.  This was a clean install of Windows 10 and not an in place upgrade.  The above backup methodology made the whole conversion process go very smoothly with no project or data loss.

I Hope that steers you in the right direction.

That is a great post Promidi. Good info.

This is a really great start.  Thanks - I'll try mucking about with RedEdit.
 
What's the word on trying to guarantee that softsynth presets (ones I may have created or edited) will always be restored?  Do I have to manually save each present into the project folder?  Is there any way to get them stored inside a bundle?
 

groove
What's the word on trying to guarantee that softsynth presets (ones I may have created or edited) will always be restored?  Do I have to manually save each present into the project folder?  Is there any way to get them stored inside a bundle?
 

I might be wrong on this one, but these key locations may give a glimmer of hope in backing up presets.  But I have not been game enough to test these though

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Cakewalk Music Software\ActiveMovie\Presets

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Cakewalk Music Software\SONAR\Platinum\PresetMRU

xcopy (or robocopy) can be scripted to only copy newer files which is efficient for backups of critical data without "copying the whole thing" each time (which can be slow and unnecessarily cycle hardware).

I posted some on that a few years ago, but xcopy is something that is quick (less than a minute) and can be daisy-chained in a batch file. I cannot find that post from my phone, but can update this later on.
 
Edit: Here is a link to the post mentioned above.

My impression is that getting your ducks in a row with the Sonar, or a DAW itself is a challenge, but do-able.
 
But some Cakewalk and other 3rd party plugins seem to scatter themselves far and wide.  A disk image is probably the best way to archive all settings and presets, etc.
 
In addition to those mentioned earlier, here are a few more that I found on my PC ... the use of 'C:Users\Public' is not something that I see in Cakewalk folder preferences ... and this stuff is three levels deep ...
 
C:\Users\Public\Documents\Cakewalk\LP EQ
C:\Users\Public\Documents\Celemony\Melodyne singletrack
C:\Users\Public\Documents\Overloud\REmatrix Solo\IRLibraries
C:\Users\Public\Documents\u-he\TyrellN6.data\Presets

In a word: Yuck.  If there's one place I can identify where the software has a ways to go it's making things easy to port between multiple setups.  A lot of people by now (I'm assuming here) have a desktop and a laptop and move files back and forth.  Having some sane way to keep them in sync would really help.  In the meanwhile, I'm thinking what will really help is to write a ...  (powershell?) script to parse the registry and possibly an ini file or two for key paths and then archive the contents of those directories.  Then a backup tool could archive these directories, specifically.  I guess another way to go is to simply set up some kind of timeline backup on the local machine, but that doesn't help me with the sync issue between desktop and laptop.
 
So, I have this cloud sync service similar to dropbox that I use: Tresorit.  I got far enough in the past week to set up a tresor (sync'd folder) between my two setups and similar to Gobbler it sees changes to files within the configured directory tree and syncs them up into the cloud (end-to-end encrypted).  If I change machines, the content is all there, and I can just press play, make changes, and go back and forth.  Since I don't run both systems at once, there's never a chance of collisions.  Tresorit seems able to ingest files about as fast as my net connection (which is fast), so I have yet to really outrun it.  I have around 20GB of collected projects and the initial sync from the desktop and download on the laptop was done in around an hour.
 
For now this is workable.  The problems I'm going to have are in keeping plugins sync'd.  I thought about putting all of the plugins into a file which is a cloud sync'd tresor, but I imagine that's risky as a few plugins have content outside of the vstplugins folder which wouldn't be reliably sync'd.  Some may have registry settings, which wouldn't be sync'd.  I'm back to having to install each plugin twice in lockstep.  Fortunately I use either NI content which allows multiple installs like Sonar, or freeware, so far, so I haven't bumped into having to buy anything twice, yet.
 
 
 

I've been storing all my projects on Google drive. The nice thing is I can switch from my studio (Desktop) to my laptop quite easily with the most updated version. I have recommended to some local bands to get a band google account so they can lay tracks onto their projects from anywhere. Only downside is only 1 person can work on it at a time. Also we are using a variable Master Bus so if some musicians have a different audio interface all they have to do is change it on the variable bus.
As far as backups are concerned my laptop OS recently completely crashed and it took me a solid week to reinstall everything. It sucked so I went and made an image after I rebuilt the laptop onto a portable storage device so in the event of a disaster I can restore quickly. 

highlandermak
I've been storing all my projects on Google drive. 

 
Does that do a realtime sync of a directory and all of its subfolders?  It might be worth a look.  Can you restore earlier versions of a file with Drive?  I've only ever used it fleetingly to store a spreadsheet or doc.