If your session drive died tonight, what would you get back tomorrow? This is a
field guide to backing a session library up to the cloud — which services would
save you, which only look like they would, and what each one costs. Prices are
July 2026 snapshots; verify on the live pricing pages before you buy.
The short version
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Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, and OneDrive are sync services, not
backups. A deletion — or a ransomware encryption — mirrors to the
cloud within minutes.
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One main machine: Backblaze Personal ($99/year, unlimited
storage). Several machines or a NAS: iDrive Personal — my
pick, after you fix two default settings covered below.
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Don't pay to store sample libraries — the vendor already
stores them. Back up sessions, recordings, and bounces: the files nobody
can re-send you.
Sync is not backup
The distinction sounds like hair-splitting until it costs you a mix. A sync
service mirrors a folder across your machines — its whole job is making
every copy identical. A backup service keeps independent, versioned
copies — its job is preserving what existed yesterday. When you delete a file,
sync obeys. Backup remembers.
iCloud earns a special mention. Apple's own documentation marks certain package
and library files "Ineligible"
and won't upload them, and its silent "waiting to upload" stalls are well
documented — one writer's stuck upload lasted
843 days.
Don't put session folders in it.
What a year costs
2026 prices, with renewal rates where they differ from the sign-up promo —
because several of these differ a lot.
Per terabyte: the sync tier runs about $60/TB/year. iDrive's 5 TB renewal works
out to roughly $24/TB/year, and Backblaze Personal's flat $99 gets cheaper the
more you store on that one machine. Wasabi
($7.99/TB/month from July 2026) is the B2 alternative if your restores stay
smaller than what you store.
Match the service to the library
My pick
iDrive Personal
For my studio, this is where I landed. One account covers every machine —
about $10 a month covers 5 TB, everything from your sessions to your photos.
It reaches the drives the others won't: externals, the NAS, a full disk
image if you want one — even your mobile devices, with Office 365 backup
as a $20/year add-on. And deleted files stay in the backup until I say
otherwise, not on a 30-day timer. On top of everything, you get your own
personal cloud drive in
addition to the backup — a separate pool that matches your plan size, so
the 5 TB plan carries a second 5 TB of mounted-drive storage. Uncheck the
two exclusion defaults
(first item below), budget the renewal price, and it's the most complete
package on this page. If you run exactly one computer and never want to
open a settings panel, Backblaze is the counter-argument — but a studio
with sessions spread across machines and drives is exactly what iDrive
covers.
The 3-2-1 rule
The old sysadmin rule still holds, and it's the frame the whole plan hangs on:
3
copies of your work
2
different kinds of media
1
copy offsite
In practice: the originals on your work drives, a Time Machine or Carbon Copy
Cloner clone in the rack, and one cloud backup. The offsite copy must live
outside your sync folders — a Dropbox that mirrors your mistakes doesn't count
as one of the three.
Back up this. Skip that.
Two habits that make restores work later: consolidate on import ("Copy from
source media" in Pro Tools) so every session carries its own audio, and
throttle your backup client while tracking so it isn't scanning the same disk
you're recording to.
Last thing: test a restore quarterly. Pull one full session down
from the cloud and open it. A backup you've never restored from is a hope, not
a plan.
Where does SessionCodex fit in this? It doesn't back anything up — it's a
catalog. But the first question in any backup plan is "what do I have, and which
drives is it on," and that's the question it answers.