What’s the Best Way to Keep My Podcast Audio Files Safe and Secure?

The cover image for this post is by Markus Wrinkler

This blog post was written by Jamie.

As a podcaster, you’re no stranger to the thrill of creating content and sharing it with the world. But have you ever stopped to think about what happens when your computer crashes, or worse, your entire system fails? This is where backing up your podcast files comes in—a crucial step in ensuring that your audio treasures remain safe and accessible.

I was inspired to write this article after listening to episode 311 of Better Podcasting. In the episode, the hosts discuss the importance of designing a backup and archive process for podcasters, and I couldn’t agree more. As a podcaster myself, I’ve learned first-hand the risks of losing valuable work due to hardware failure or software corruption.

That’s why I want to dive into the world of backing up your podcast files—a topic that’s both essential and often overlooked. In this article, we’ll explore the different methods for backing up your audio content, including converting raw recordings, using a multi-layered approach to archiving projects, and performing integrity checks.

This post will focus on backing up completed projects, as these are typically the largest files that you’ll create when working on your podcast. Please also note that, whilst this post focuses on audio-only podcasts, the advice here is still applicable to video-based podcasts; however, you’ll need more storage space, as raw video tends to required more storage space than raw audio.

Converting Raw Recordings: A Pre-Edit Backup

When any of our editors are preparing raw recordings for editing, we often convert them from WAV to FLAC before feeding them into the DAW (digital audio workstation). The main difference between WAV and FLAC is that WAV is a true, uncompressed, 1:1 digital representation of the source audio; whereas FLAC is a lossless compression format which represents the same source audio.

Note: “Lossless” here means that, whilst the file is compressed, it retains all of the source data. This is different to, say MP3 compression, which intentionally removes data from the audio in order to provide a much smaller file in comparison to the source audio.

This step serves two purposes:

• First, it reduces the file size by compressing the audio, making it more manageable.
• Second, it converts the files to a lossless format, preserving the original quality and integrity.

For example, one of the raw audio tracks for a recent episode of The Modern .NET Show was 109 minutes long and recorded as a WAV file with a sample frequency of 48kHz and in stereo; the file was around 551 MB. After converting to FLAC, dropping the sample frequency to 44.1kHz, and converting to mono, the file file was 133 MB—25% of the original file size without compromising on the perceived sound quality.

The following is a table comparing the filesizes:

* = MP3 was included for comparison purposes. We would not recommend converting your raw audio to MP3 as it is a lossy compression format and you will lose the fidelity of the original data.

While converting raw recordings is an important step, it’s essential to remember that these files are often fragile and prone to corruption. That’s why it’s crucial to treat them with care and only perform this conversion process once – before feeding them into your DAW for editing.

The conversion process can either be done within your DAW, or by using the FFMPEG command line interface and the following command:

ffmpeg -i {input file}.wav -ac 1 -ar 44100 {output file}.flac

where:

• {input file}.wav is the original WAV file - {output file}.flac is the target name of the output FLAC file.

To understand what the above command is doing, see this link.

The 3-2-1 Rule: A Foundation for Any Backup System

When designing any backup system, it’s essential to follow the 3-2-1 rule. This rule may seem simple, but its importance cannot be overstated:

• Three copies: You should have at least three copies of your data
• Two different storage types: Each copy should be stored on two different types of media or devices (e.g., hard drive and network-attached storage)
• One off-site copy: One of the copies should be stored off-site, in a secure location away from your primary workspace

The 3-2-1 rule ensures that you have multiple layers of protection against data loss. If one device fails or is compromised, the other two copies can help recover your data. Additionally, having an off-site copy provides peace of mind, knowing that your data is safe and secure even in the event of a catastrophic failure.

A recent, real-world, example of such a catastrophic event is the fallout of the 2024 Atlantic Hurricane Season. This series of natural disasters was the cause of around $191 billion in damage. Off-site backups mean that your house or office can be destroyed and you will not lose your data. Admittedly, if your house or office is destroyed, you may have bigger problems than where your data is.

By following the 3-2-1 rule, you can create a robust backup system that protects your podcast files from various risks. This rule applies not only to audio files but also to any other types of data you store, including video, images, and text files.

Archiving Projects: A Multi-Layered Approach

Now, when it comes to archiving projects, I defer to our Chief Audio Editor: Mark. He has set up an entire backup and archive system which looks like the following:

Firstly, the engineer who is assigned the audio exports the project using Audition (our chosen DAW). But that’s not the end of the story – I have a multi-layered approach in place to ensure the podcast files are safe and secure.

First, we use Tailscale to create a peer-to-peer VPN between our machines as we’re a remote-first company. Using Tailscale allows us to securely access and synchronise the files on from the engineer’s machine, without any risk of data corruption or tampering.

See this blog post to learn more about why we use Tailscale.

We synchronise completed projects every Monday to a central server cluster—this is a fully automated process, ensuring that only completed projects are automatically backed up. This allows us to keep a local (to the engineer) hot copy of the completed projects, but also to start the journey to created colder copies of the them.

That central server cluster has an automated backup service which fires on a Friday night, which does a full synchronisation with our chosen cloud-based backup service. The cloud-based backup service of choice provides us with “glacial” data backups (backups which are furthest away from our engineers machines). Once it has been confirmed that the completed projects have synchronised to our cloud-based backup system, our engineers are safe to delete them from their machines.

This leaves us with several copies of the completed projects across our central server cluster (all encrypted at rest), and copies on our cloud-based backup provider’s systems. By confirming that the data is integrity-checked at each stage of the journey from the individual engineer’s machine to the cloud-based backup service, we ensure that our audio treasures remain secure and protected.

The Importance of Integrity Checks

Integrity checks are a crucial aspect of backing up your podcast files. These checks verify that the data has not been corrupted or tampered with during the transfer process—ensuring that each copy remains accurate and reliable.

In most well-written backup and synchronisation applications, the integrity check will be provided for you. We use an application which wraps around the amazing rsync utility. Rsync can be configured to both compress data ahead of transit (automatically decompressing on the other end) and to verify that the file has been delivered correctly by performing an MD5 check.

Note: while MD5 has it’s issues and it’s possible for data collisions to happen, we find it perfectly adequate for out backup system. This is because rsync uses an SSH connection under the hood, an the entire process makes use of Tailscale’s peer-to-peer VPN.

In fact, our automated backup system will not start if either the engineer’s machine or our server-cluster aren’t connected to the VPN.

In my experience, integrity checks have saved me from losing valuable work in the past. By performing regular integrity checks, you can ensure that your backup files are trustworthy and reliable.

Conclusion: Backing Up Your Podcast Files is Crucial

In conclusion, backing up your podcast files is an essential step in protecting your audio content from data loss. By following the 3-2-1 rule, converting raw recordings to losslessly compressed formats, and using a multi-layered approach to archiving projects, you can create a robust backup system that ensures your files are safe and secure. Bonus points if you can automate it, like we have.

Remember, backing up your podcast files is not just about protecting your work—it’s also about preserving your sanity. Losing valuable data can be stressful and overwhelming, but with a solid backup system in place, you can rest assured that your files are safe.

Don’t risk losing your precious work – take control of your podcast files today.

Learn more about how you can leverage our podcast editing and mastering services today.

If you’d like us to help you work through the challenges involved with your podcasting projects, either in a hands-on capacity or as a consultant, get in touch with the form below