It is critical that you save your work frequently, and back it up by making
copies onto external hard drives and/or hard media such as CDs and DVDs.
In addition, we highly recommend that you make hard copies of everything.
Print out your scores and parts and make recordings of all your work. Through
the course of their careers, many musicians have had to transfer work from
analog tape to VHS Hi-Fi, to DAT, and finally to MP3 audio files and CDs. No
one knows what the next 30 years will bring or how relevant your musical
ideas may be by then, but you need to make it a habit to keep archives of
your work that can be accessed by modern methods.
240 Part IV: Orchestration and Arrangement