Yeah, that's a good idea. I have 1 internal & 1 external 1TB Western Digital drive(s)to do just the same with.

Some people are getting confused. This thread is not about backing up Sonar projects. It is about a method to backing up and rebuilding your whole computer.

Yes the dreaded thread drift!

Norton ghost is what I would use for backing up a whole hard drive.

Jeff Evans


Some people are getting confused. This thread is not about backing up Sonar projects. It is about a method to backing up and rebuilding your whole computer.

Exactly where I initially went with it  


When mine crashed, All the HDDs (3) were TOAST (Will not work) & the video card fried

I didnt have a clone and as far as back ups of projects, I did have them saved on DVDs so I was lucky there 

As cheap as that 1 TB Baaracuda is that comes with Acronis, Im thinking dont let this happen again  

I also send myself an email with any product codes and registration information for all my installed software, in case I cannot find the original install discs and the backups fail and the sun doesn't rise and I wake up as a female stripper.

I keep a clone of my primary drive on one external SATA 3 drive, and a backup of my data drive on an external USB 3.0 drive.  (and I really do use an email to keep my registrations and product codes handy).

Bob Bone

I keep all my registration/activation codes/keys/etc. in a single Notepad file.  I copy & paste from there whenever I reinstall any software.

robert_e_bone

I also send myself an email with any product codes and registration information for all my installed software, in case I cannot find the original install discs and the backups fail and the sun doesn't rise and I wake up as a female stripper.

I keep a clone of my primary drive on one external SATA 3 drive, and a backup of my data drive on an external USB 3.0 drive.  (and I really do use an email to keep my registrations and product codes handy).

Bob Bone

I remember back when I got Sound Forge 9.0. I used to keep all my registration stuff in an email. Then the first time I had to replace my HDD (back then Acronis did not support restoring your HDD to a different drive so I had to do a fresh install of everything and couldn't use my backup), I discovered that Sound Forge and some other programs will not allow you to activate their software with the same reg info twice.

Fast forward a few years, I have now done a fresh install of Windows 7, and I can't activate Sound Forge 9.0 because it says I have activated it too many times. And ... there are several other things you have to register in Sound Forge ... so I'm totally screwed at the moment.

So, keeping backups of all your reg stuff is a good idea, but keep in mind it doesn't help in all situations.

I used to put them in a .TXT file and print them. Nobody ever comes to my recording room except me, and my family wouldn't steal from me, I hope. But then I stopped doing it for reasons I mentioned with Sound Forge.

I'm pretty pissed off at Sony right now. It says I can reactivate it, but I have to call them to get authorization. That's not right, but the way the world works now. I even tried to get a crack for it, imagine, cracking your own software, but it seems that you can't even get cracks any more. You have to sign up and pay for one of those file storage sites to get anything, and I'm not going to give criminals a single penny of my money. It's one thing to do what I was trying to do ... but it's another to financially support that kind of thing.

For years, I lived on the edge (backing up to DVDs only say every 2-3 years). Bad form, I know. I decided last month to buy a 1-TB internal SATA drive for evening backups. I keep all of my projects grouped by folder, by year. (I literally have top level folders for 1995, 1996, 1997, ... 2011, 2012, 2013). Within each are folders for the songs. (Older years before PPA just have songs and one 'audio' folder.) The backup drive has current copies of all. ANYway... after an evening of working in Sonar, I just grab the appropriate year (or song) folder and drag a copy over to the spare backups drive. Seems easier than relying on some software program (Ghost, Acronis, Windoze). Just my $0.02. Sorry for contributing to thread topic-creep.