Portability and backups

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?
 

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.

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.
 
 
 

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.

groove

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.

It depends on your internet speed however with a project file usually being under 5mb by the time I go upstairs it has already synced and can work on it from my bed. I have not researched the ability for historical versions so keep many versions with the date and time stamp. That way if a project goes of the rails I can usually find through my versions where it started going off the tracks. I also use the drive to listen to mixdown versions so once I've rendered a project I can head into my car to hear what it sounds like through my phone with the google drive app interfaced with my Bluetooth.