You spend years dialing in cue points, cleaning up tags, and building the exact playlists that carry your sets. Then a drive dies, a laptop gets lifted from the booth, or a botched OS update wipes a folder, and all of it is gone in a second. The tracks you can usually re-buy. The work you layered on top of them, the cues, grids, energy tags, and crates, is what actually hurts to lose. That is the part a backup routine has to protect.
The good news is that a proper backup strategy is not complicated, and Lexicon already has the tools to do most of it. Here is how to apply the classic 3-2-1 rule to a DJ library so a single failure never ends your night.
The 3-2-1 rule, translated for DJs
The 3-2-1 rule is the standard that IT and photographers have used for years, and it maps cleanly onto a DJ library:
- 3 copies of your data (the original plus two backups)
- 2 different types of media (for example an internal SSD and an external drive, not two folders on the same disk)
- 1 copy offsite (somewhere physically separate, so a stolen bag or a house fire does not take every copy at once)
The trap most DJs fall into is thinking one external drive counts as a backup. It does not. If your music lives only on that drive and the drive fails, you have zero copies. Two folders on the same disk is one copy. The whole point of 3-2-1 is that no single event, a dead drive, a stolen laptop, a ransomware hit, can reach all three copies.
For a Lexicon user, "your data" is really two separate things, and you have to protect both.
Back up the database and the music separately
This is the single most important thing to understand: your audio files and your Lexicon database are two different assets, and a backup of one is not a backup of the other.
Your music files are the audio. Your Lexicon database is everything you built on top of them: tags like artist and title, cue points, playlists, and your settings. Lexicon stores that in its own database, and it gives you a dedicated tool to save it.
To back up the database, go to Backups → Database Backup → Create backup. Lexicon saves a ZIP of your database (tags, cue points, playlists, and settings) into your Documents/Lexicon/Backups folder. One thing to note: this backup does not include your music files, so you still have to back those up separately. Also worth knowing before you rely on that folder alone: backups older than one month are automatically deleted, so an old backup you assumed was still sitting there may not be.
For the audio side, this is where the "2 different types of media" part of the rule comes in. Keep your working music on one drive, and run a real file copy to a second, physically different drive. A drive clone tool or even a scheduled folder sync is fine here. The goal is that if the working drive dies, a full copy of the actual files is sitting on hardware that did not die with it.
There is one more layer of safety that runs automatically. When Lexicon writes changes into a DJ app's database (Rekordbox, Serato, Engine, and so on), it creates a backup of that app's database first, stored in a Lexicon folder inside the DJ app's own database folder. That is a nice safety net for the DJ app side, but treat it as a bonus, not your backup plan. It does not protect your Lexicon database or your audio files.
Your offsite copy: Lexicon's cloud
The third copy has to live somewhere else. An external drive that sits in the same bag as your laptop is not offsite, it is just a second thing to get stolen at the same time. This is where cloud storage earns its place, and Lexicon has two separate cloud features that cover the two separate assets.
For the audio files, Lexicon's Cloud Storage uploads your actual tracks to the Lexicon cloud. Right-click tracks or playlists and use Upload to cloud. Anything you have uploaded is then available for streaming, which means even if you do not have the track on your computer, you can still play it in Lexicon. Each time you upload or download, Lexicon writes a report into your Documents/Lexicon folder listing exactly what moved, which is handy for confirming a big upload actually finished. Cloud Storage is quota-based: the Essential plan includes 1,000 cloud tracks and the Ultimate plan includes 10,000, with an optional addon for unlimited uploads under a fair use policy. Files need to be music files under 200MB each.
For the database, use Cloud Database Backup under Backups → Database Backup → Cloud Database Backup. This puts a copy of all that cue-point and playlist work offsite too. On the Ultimate plan you get a weekly reminder to make one, which is exactly the kind of nudge that keeps a backup routine from quietly dying. There is a limit of 10 cloud database backups, so think of it as a rolling window of recent snapshots rather than an infinite archive.
Put those two together and your offsite copy is complete: the audio in Cloud Storage, the metadata in a Cloud Database Backup. Neither one alone is your whole library, but together they are.
When it all goes wrong: restore and relocate
A backup you have never tested is a guess, not a backup. It is worth walking through recovery once while nothing is on fire.
Restoring a database backup is straightforward, but read this carefully: restoring a backup completely deletes your old database. It is a full replace, not a merge. That is exactly what you want after a real disaster, but it also means you do not casually restore an old backup on a working library and expect to keep both. Proceed with caution and make sure the backup you are restoring is the one you actually want.
The other half of recovery is reconnecting your database to your music after the files move. If you restore your audio to a new drive, or Windows hands your external a different drive letter, Lexicon will show those tracks as missing. Lexicon will ask where you want to download the files in that case.
If you regularly run the same library across two machines, Local Path Mappings (Ultimate only) is worth setting up. It lets you use the same Lexicon database on multiple computers, even mixing Windows and macOS, by mapping base paths (say D:/Music/ on one machine to G:/Music/ on another) so tracks do not show up missing every time you switch. It does not sync your Lexicons for you, so you still handle the backup and restore between machines, but it takes the path pain out of a two-computer setup.
Set this up once and the payoff is simple: the next time a drive dies the week of a big gig, it is an annoyance instead of a catastrophe. Three copies, two kinds of media, one of them offsite. Then actually test a restore. Future you, standing in the booth, will be glad you did.
