so im accumulating a lot of patches and was wondering if you all bother to store patches externally once you’ve made a bunch? particularily with an external drive or something like google drive? i would have to assume something like google drive is the better option due to reliability issues with external drives.
well, you know what they always say about backing up your computer… something off your computer is a good idea, whether it’s drive or dropbox or github…
I go a little overboard on backing up. every day I back up my main drive to a server in my house, and I back up my home folder to the clouds every day, too.
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What services do you use? For a long time now, I want to have a backup online somewhere.
Another possibility to store/ have a backup of your patches is a github repository, you could use it just for the patches, you can even automate the backup
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I’ve thought about using Patchstorage to keep a copy of any successful patch, but it’s a lot of bother. My home setup includes a RAID system which keeps a copy of everything. Each new save session goes into a separate folder so nothing is overwritten so I have a full history to go back to.
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I’m a bit of a cloud skeptic from the market politics involved, but I have a bit of an RAIC setup. Things get rsynced across several computers on a regular basis. Really important (work for others) things go to off-line media, and maybe bank vaults. If a customer wants stuff in the cloud, I have no trouble, but I trust redundant storage more than I trust the players in cloud space, and if my setup burns down, I have far bigger problems than missing data. My music directory gets synced across eleven computers (I’ve been at this a while, and old boxes have next to no resale value) sitting on a GigE net, and many of them spend a lot of their life suspended.
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I’ve used Backblaze.com for years and had no problems. Not endorsing them. Just saying. As Rack patch files are so small I don’t delete anything. 
I store them in folders named after the Rack version I made them in…
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I don’t recommend my crazy solution. I use Acronis True image both to image my computers to the server and to backup into their cloud. I only use this system because a) I’ve been using it a long time and I’m lazy, and b) I really want to have an daily image if my boot drives so I can bring my windows machines back online very quickly if one of them refuses to boot.
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That’s what I would do, but then again I’m already a git addict. I don’t think normal people like it as much. Probably only worth the trouble if you care about versioning and history?
Git’s really not a bad thing. Just about anything important gets a local repo clone, and just about anything winds up with a local-hacks branch.
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I use dropbox
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I sync my patches to an iCloud folder.
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good to see all the replies. thanks. 
like @caowasteland im also weary of cloud services thats why i was curious what others were doing. that being said i have seen Backblaze recommended before on the Reaper Blog channel on youtube.
i’ve had and seen my fair share of external drives die. i do store my a/v files on external drives but then i have to back them up with another drive.
a cloud service would be pretty convenient for backing up patches.
Not only do I not back my patches up, I delete my patch directory weekly unless I’m still tweaking something. It’s easy to fall in love with the concept of going back to old patches/music in general, but the value of generative synthesis (for me, at least) is in the immediate process, and I don’t get that rush stepping back in to finished patches.
If I want to recreate something in the future, I’d generally have a better time just retracing my steps and creating an approximation with new techniques I’ve learned since the last time I patched stuff up. The calculus might change if I was commercially releasing something and obligated to be able to exactly recreate it, though.
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