Automating Your Backups

One of the MOST important things to do is backup your music files. It doesn’t matter if you use Finale, Sibelius, Musescore, or whatever. You need to back it up. And sometimes, you need to just backup the whole folder just to have a copy “just in case”.

I’ve been using a script on my Mac to do this. It makes an archive, using Keka, and puts it in a path where it gets Synced to Google Drive. And it will also go through and delete archives older than 100 days. I generally also move things to another folder on Google drive to have a monthly archive of stuff as well.

Anyhow, the script is this. It is triggered by crontab.

#!/bin/bash
cd /Volumes/mygoogledrive/Documents\ Archive/Finale\ Archives/

/Applications/Keka.app/Contents/Resources/keka7z a -t7z -r -m0=lzma2 -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=on FinaleArchive-$(date '+%Y-%m-%d').7z /Volumes/mygoogledrive/FinaleDocs/

find /Volumes/mygoogledrive/Documents\ Archive/Finale\ Archives/ -type f -name '*.7z' -mtime +100 -delete

UPDATE: Did a little tweaking, moved to using ExpanDrive, and the original script was not working right. Here is the updated one.

#!/bin/bash
ArchiveName=FinaleArchive-$(date '+%Y-%m-%d').7z
/Applications/Keka.app/Contents/Resources/keka7z a -t7z -r -m0=lzma2 -mx=9 -mfb=64 -md=32m -ms=on $ArchiveName /Volumes/GoogleDrive/FinaleDocs/*
mv $ArchiveName /Volumes/GoogleDrive/Documents\ Archive/Finale\ Archives/
find /Volumes/GoogleDrive/Documents\ Archive/Finale\ Archives/ -type f -name '*.7z' -mtime +100 -delete

Since I pay for a google business account, I was using Google Filestream. But this will also work with Google Backup and Sync. Or things like InSync or ExpanDrive (highly recommended). Keep in mind if you use Backup and Sync, or InSync, the archives stay on your computer. Using ExpanDrive or Filestream puts them into a temp space while it gets uploaded to Google. But you can adapt the basic idea to whatever online storage thingy you have. OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.

BUT PLEASE BACKUP. There is NOTHING worse than losing something you have spent hours on. Time Machine, Backblaze, whatever. But do something.