This is a subject I have been struggling with and running try-erros for a while now. I wanted to put this question here as I suppose in the forum there are many other sound artists / composers which have the same issue. This does not really relate directly to Ardour, but as an Ardour/Linux user I thought I might find ideas which would suit me and my needs better.
So the question ist: How do you make your works/projects safe?
I have been trying to use Git for this, but I should say it is not the best choice for huge works would take huge amount of time to be pushed to the repositories if the project is very big, not mentioning the fact that the size of repositories on Github/Gitlab are limited as far as I know.
To be clear, I am interested in free and open source solutions in the first place here.
Does anyone like to share his/her ideas?
Depends how you define “safe”.
Speaking for myself, I use external USB hard drives to backup my private data (including the audio workspaces), following the 3-2-1 backup rule: have at least 3 copies on at least 2 different drives, and at least 1 is physically located on a different place from home.
Regarding “long term archiving” of my audio projects I recently found another issue, I didn’t think of before: After upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 I observed that tracks using the Guitarix Amp plugin suddenly clipped and even when reducing the pre-gain they sounded a bit different than before.
What I’m doing now is: whenever I’m done with a song, I will create “bounce tracks” of each guitar track and all group buses (drums, bass, guitars, vocals). This way, if I do system upgrades in the future and want to open up an old project, I always have the bounce tracks as reference.