How to Back Up Your Digital Sheet Music

Most musicians store their sheet music across a mix of cloud services and local folders. Fewer have an actual backup. This post covers what's worth using and why the distinction between syncing and backing up matters more than most people realize.

Syncing Is Not a Backup

This is the one thing worth understanding before picking any tool.

Syncing — iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive — mirrors your files across devices. It's great for access. But if a file gets deleted, the deletion syncs everywhere. If an annotated score gets overwritten, the overwrite propagates. The sync service does exactly what it's supposed to do, which is the problem.

A backup holds a snapshot of your files independent of what's happening on your devices. You can go back to last Tuesday. Syncing can't do that.

The best setup uses both — sync for convenience, backup for recovery.

Syncing Services

iCloud Drive

The easiest choice for iPad users running forScore, GoodReader, or similar apps. Tight integration with iOS, automatic sync across Apple devices, and storage that scales up to 12TB. If you're already in the Apple ecosystem, this is the default starting point.

Parachute

Parachute is specifically designed to back up iCloud Drive to storage you control — an external drive, NAS, or another cloud service like Google Drive or Dropbox. It's a one-time purchase, runs on Mac and iOS, and handles iCloud's Optimize Storage setting without filling up your local disk. Backup modes include full, incremental, and mirror. Worth knowing: if a file errors mid-backup, the app can stall without notifying you, so it's worth checking in on longer runs.

Google Drive

Works across platforms and handles PDFs and MusicXML without issue. Google One plans go up to 2TB. Useful for ensembles — sharing a folder of parts with other musicians is more straightforward than with iCloud.

Dropbox

Paid plans include up to 180 days of version history, which is longer than most sync services offer. That means if a score gets overwritten with the wrong version, there's a reasonable chance Dropbox has the original. More expensive per gigabyte than the alternatives, but the version history earns some of that back.

OneDrive

Comes with Microsoft 365 at 1TB. Works fine, less integrated with music-specific apps than iCloud. A sensible option if you're already paying for it.

Backup Solutions

Time Machine

Apple's built-in backup tool for Mac. Connect an external drive, point Time Machine at it, done. It captures hourly snapshots for the past day, daily for the past month, weekly beyond that. Simple to set up and reliable for recovering deleted files. The limitation is that the backup drive is almost certainly in the same room as your computer.

Backblaze

Backblaze runs in the background and continuously backs up everything on your Mac and connected external drives to the cloud — no storage caps, no file size limits, file versions kept for up to a year. Around $9/month as of early 2025; verify current pricing on their site. Restore by downloading from the cloud or requesting a drive by mail. It fills the gap Time Machine leaves: off-site and automatic once it's running.

The 3-2-1 Rule

A useful framework: 3 copies of your data, on 2 different types of storage, with 1 copy off-site. In practice: primary library on your computer, local backup via Time Machine, off-site backup via Backblaze. A sync service adds accessibility on top of that — it's not a substitute for any of the three.

Before You Start

Worth doing first: if any of your scores came from services with download limits — Musicnotes, Sheet Music Plus — re-download them while you still can. And export any Finale, or MuseScore files to PDF so you have a copy that doesn't depend on specific software to open.