5. Back up your sounds
Many producers have stories where they’ve lost dozens if not hundreds of hours or work because of a hard drive failure. If your sounds are stored in a single location, all it takes is one accident, loss or hardware failure to wipe out your entire library.
Working without backups is an unnecessary risk, and if you value the time you’ve spent developing your sound library and project archive it makes sense to take precautions in this area.
External hard drives are relatively cheap – because you’re not working from these backups, you can use a cheap HDD rather than a fast SSD – so your first line of defense should be to back up your sounds on at least two external drives in addition to whatever drive you work from. This will ensure that even if there’s a problem with one of the backups, you’ll have at least one other backup to restore your data from. Dedicated backup software such as Carbon Copy Cloner for MacOS is available to make creating backups easier.
Ideally you’d want an “offsite” backup, in case that, say, your studio is struck by a meteorite while you’re out getting coffee. If that’s not practical for you or you’d just like a more convenient solution, consider making a backup of your sound library in an online storage space, for example a Google Drive or Dropbox.
It’s also possible to backup your whole computer with automated online backup services like Backblaze, and this alongside regular local backups will give you peace of mind that your sound library isn’t at risk.
Start organizing your sound library today
In this guide we’ve looked at five ways to make it easy to organize your sounds, improve your production workflow, and protect your work for future use.
If you’d like to learn more about music making with Native Instruments check out Kontakt 8, What is Kontakt?, Getting started with Kontakt to create music and The 100 best free Kontakt instruments in 2025.
