You don't say whether you're on Windows or on Mac OS, but, if you're on Mac OS, I think there's an easier way.
This is roughly my hierarchy on my drive inside
/blah/Dropbox/Fractal
:
Code:
├── Backups
│ ├── FM3-200903-183200 (factory).zip
│ ├── FM3-210914-173049.zip
│ ├── FM9-211218-210935.zip
│ ├── FM9-220114-174417.zip
│ ├── IIIMk2-210618-164115.zip
│ └── more stuff…
├── Editor data
│ ├── Blocks
│ │ ├── Amplifier
│ │ ├── more stuff…
│ │ └── Wahwah
│ ├── Snapshots
│ │ ├── FM3
│ │ ├── FM9
│ │ └── FX3
│ └── Templates
│ ├── FM3
│ ├── FM9
│ └── FX3
├── FM3
│ └── stuff…
├── FM9
│ └── stuff…
├── FX3
│ └── stuff…
├── Impulse Responses
│ ├── Acoustic IRs
│ │ └── stuff…
│ ├── Celestion
│ │ └── stuff…
│ ├── Ownhammer
│ │ └── stuff…
│ ├── Redwirez
│ │ └── stuff…
│ ├── York Audio
│ │ └── stuff…
│ └── stuff…
├── Presets and more
│ ├── layouts
│ └── presets and blocks
- I manually created the
Backups
folder inside the Fractal
folder. You can put it anywhere you want, but I wanted redundancy in my backups and a common space for them.
- My "Fractal" folder hierarchy is anchored inside my Dropbox folder, but Google Drive or similar tools will also help make things safer because they'll automatically back up your backup files to the cloud. I have Apple's Time Machine, a full backup to the cloud, plus the Dropbox folder hierarchy. Have at least two points of backup!
- My editors for the FM3, FM9, and FX3, have their various workspaces defined inside that Fractal folder.
- The Editor workspaces for Blocks, Snapshots, and Templates point to their own separate folders inside
Editor data
.
- All three editors point to the same "Blocks" folder, so I can use the blocks in common in the editors. That interchangeability is not guaranteed to work, but usually does so caveat emptor. I was out of town if something goes wrong.
- I use separate Snapshots and Templates folders because the various units can't necessarily use all the same blocks and it irritates me when I realize I screwed up and tried to load an FX3 preset into the FM3.
Focusing on the Backups folder, all three editors write to the same folder for my convenience, because I like one-stop shopping. Fractal-Bot, whether it's embedded in the editor, or is stand-alone, writes the backup files using a consistent naming scheme of
<device name>-<YYMMDD>-<HHMMSS>.sys
.
The files are a consistent size for the FM* units:
Code:
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 3159040 Apr 1 16:41 FM3-220401-164138-bank-A.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 3159040 Apr 1 16:42 FM3-220401-164138-bank-B.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 3159040 Apr 1 16:42 FM3-220401-164138-bank-C.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 3159040 Apr 1 16:42 FM3-220401-164138-bank-D.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 197270 Apr 1 16:41 FM3-220401-164138-system+gb+fc.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 10593280 Apr 1 16:44 FM3-220401-164138-user-cab-bank-1.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 3159040 Apr 1 14:48 FM9-220401-144723-bank-A.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 3159040 Apr 1 14:48 FM9-220401-144723-bank-B.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 3159040 Apr 1 14:49 FM9-220401-144723-bank-C.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 3159040 Apr 1 14:50 FM9-220401-144723-bank-D.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 197270 Apr 1 14:47 FM9-220401-144723-system+gb+fc.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 10593280 Apr 1 14:53 FM9-220401-144723-user-cab-bank-1.syx
and the FX3 is:
Code:
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 6.0M Mar 30 14:36 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-A.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 6.0M Mar 30 14:37 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-B.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 6.0M Mar 30 14:38 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-C.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 6.0M Mar 30 14:39 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-D.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 6.0M Mar 30 14:40 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-E.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 6.0M Mar 30 14:41 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-F.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 6.0M Mar 30 14:42 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-G.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 6.0M Mar 30 14:42 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-H.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 193K Mar 30 14:36 IIIMk2-220330-143606-system+gb+fc.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 10M Mar 30 14:44 IIIMk2-220330-143606-user-cab-bank-1.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 10M Mar 30 14:46 IIIMk2-220330-143606-user-cab-bank-2.syx
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 647K Mar 30 14:46 IIIMk2-220330-143606-user-cab-bank-fr.syx
Rather than spend time managing a hierarchy of too many files, and having spent too many years as a developer, I looked at the size of the files compressed. Here are the results of zipping the files:
Code:
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 497214 Apr 1 22:31 FM3-220401-164138-bank-A.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 459402 Apr 1 22:31 FM3-220401-164138-bank-B.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 473242 Apr 1 22:31 FM3-220401-164138-bank-C.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 201516 Apr 1 22:31 FM3-220401-164138-bank-D.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 2045 Apr 1 22:31 FM3-220401-164138-system+gb+fc.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 144634 Apr 1 22:31 FM3-220401-164138-user-cab-bank-1.syx.zip
Code:
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 530611 Apr 1 22:31 FM9-220401-144723-bank-A.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 476748 Apr 1 22:31 FM9-220401-144723-bank-B.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 493670 Apr 1 22:31 FM9-220401-144723-bank-C.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 233244 Apr 1 22:31 FM9-220401-144723-bank-D.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 132214 Apr 1 22:31 FM9-220401-144723-system+gb+fc.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 230895 Apr 1 22:31 FM9-220401-144723-user-cab-bank-1.syx.zip
Code:
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 626K Apr 1 22:03 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-A.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 517K Apr 1 22:03 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-B.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 580K Apr 1 22:03 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-C.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 296K Apr 1 22:03 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-D.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 108K Apr 1 22:03 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-E.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 12K Apr 1 22:03 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-F.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 12K Apr 1 22:03 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-G.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 12K Apr 1 22:03 IIIMk2-220330-143606-bank-H.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 113K Apr 1 22:03 IIIMk2-220330-143606-system+gb+fc.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 234K Apr 1 22:03 IIIMk2-220330-143606-user-cab-bank-1.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 28K Apr 1 22:03 IIIMk2-220330-143606-user-cab-bank-2.syx.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 2.1K Apr 1 22:03 IIIMk2-220330-143606-user-cab-bank-fr.syx.zip
so it's pretty obvious there's some major space to be saved by archiving the individual files, but rather than do them individually, I do it by the date-time stamp because they're identical once a backup starts.
Here are the same three sets of files when they're compressed:
Code:
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 1.7M Apr 1 21:26 FM3-220401-164138.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 2.0M Apr 1 21:26 FM9-220401-144723.zip
-rw-r--r--@ 1 gregferguson staff 2.5M Mar 31 23:00 IIIMk2-220330-143606.zip
I decided there's little reason to keep them burst into separate files when it's so easy to unzip them when I need to get their contents.
I wrote a little .sh script that runs in the terminal from my
~/bin
directory that walks through the backup directory looking for
.sys
files, grabs the device name and date and time stamps, and runs them through
uniq
, then, for each individual stamp, grabs all the files and zips them together into one .zip file.
Code:
#!/bin/sh -x
pushd <the_path_to_your_backups>
for i in `ls *.syx | cut -d '-' -f 1,2,3 | uniq`
do
zip -vm $i.zip $i-*.syx
done
popd
Replace
<the_path_to_your_backups>
with the actual path to the backup folder you've defined.
Save that script to your disk in your
~/bin
directory as
fa_archive.sh
, and set the executable flag using
chmod +x ~/bin/fa_archive.sh
from the command line.
Then, as long as your Fractal-Bot, embedded or standalone, points to that directory, you can run backups, then periodically run the
~/bin/fa_archive.sh
script and it'll build individual zip files for each backup run, then delete the
*.sys
files.
I've been using this for a couple of years, and it's worked correctly every time. Of course, if it doesn't work you didn't hear it from me because I was out of town when it happened.