Hard drives fail. Windows corrupts. Mistakes happen. The stations that survive these events are the ones that had a recovery plan in place before they needed it. The stations that do not have a plan spend days or weeks rebuilding what they lost.
This guide covers two closely related topics: protecting your station from data loss with a proper backup strategy, and choosing the right streaming provider to host your station reliably on the internet.
This guide is part of the Complete Guide to Building a 24/7 Internet Radio Station with PlayoutONE.
What to Back Up
A complete PlayoutONE station backup needs to cover five areas:
1. Your Audio Library
Your music, imaging, commercials, and shows. This is almost certainly your most valuable asset — years of curation and organisation. An audio library is irreplaceable if it contains original content, voice tracking recordings, or custom imaging produced for your station. Back it up to at least two locations.
2. The PlayoutONE Database
PlayoutONE stores your library metadata — artist names, titles, categories, cue points, play history, rotation data, and separation tracking — in a database. Losing this database means re-importing and re-cataloguing your entire library even if your audio files survive. The location of the database folder depends on your installation — check the PlayoutONE documentation or settings for the data directory path.
3. Clock Configurations
Your clocks represent hours of programming design work. Export and back them up separately. PlayoutONE typically provides an export function for clocks — use it regularly.
4. Schedule Templates
Any recurring schedule templates or daypart configurations you have built. These can take significant time to recreate if lost.
5. Application Configuration Files
Settings files for PlayoutONE, LiveStream, AutoImport, FileCopy, and Monitor. These include your streaming credentials, audio device selections, folder paths, and import rules. Losing them means reconfiguring every application from scratch.
Backup Schedule
How often you back up depends on how much work you are willing to redo. A practical schedule:
- Daily: Back up the PlayoutONE database and configuration files. These change every day and are relatively small in size.
- Weekly: Full audio library backup to your primary backup location.
- Monthly: Offsite or cloud backup of the complete station — audio library plus database plus configurations.
Use Windows Task Scheduler to automate your daily backups. A simple robocopy command (built into Windows) can mirror your critical folders to a backup location on a schedule without any additional software:
robocopy "C:Radio" "D:BackupRadio" /MIR /LOG:"D:Backuprobocopy.log"
Backup Storage Locations
The backup rule is: at least two copies, in at least two different locations.
- External USB drive: Fast, cheap, always available. Plug it in, run your backup, optionally unplug it and store it away from the broadcast PC. If your PC is stolen or destroyed, the backup on the same desk is gone too.
- NAS (Network Attached Storage): A dedicated storage device on your local network. Provides redundancy (RAID configurations), network access, and does not require physical connection to the broadcast PC for each backup.
- Cloud backup: Backblaze, Wasabi, Amazon S3, or a consumer service like Google Drive or OneDrive for smaller backups. Cloud backup protects against physical disasters — fire, flood, theft — that destroy local backups. For large audio libraries, upload time can be significant initially but incremental updates are fast.
UPS Battery Backup: Non-Optional for Serious Stations
A UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) is a battery that sits between your broadcast PC and the wall outlet. When power fails or dips, the UPS supplies battery power and keeps your equipment running — buying you time to safely shut down or ride out a brief outage.
For broadcast stations, the benefits are:
- Database protection: Abrupt power loss while PlayoutONE is writing to its database corrupts it. A UPS gives the PC time to write any pending data and shut down cleanly.
- Stream continuity: Brief power dips (lasting less than the UPS battery capacity) do not drop your stream at all.
- Equipment protection: UPS units typically include surge protection and power conditioning that protect sensitive audio hardware from voltage spikes.
For a broadcast PC and monitor, a UPS rated at 600–1000VA provides 10–20 minutes of runtime — more than enough to ride out most short outages or shut down safely during a longer one.
Choosing a Streaming Provider
Your streaming provider hosts the server that your listeners connect to. The quality, reliability, and features of your provider directly affect your listeners’ experience. Choosing on price alone is a mistake — a provider that goes down regularly or limits your bitrate options costs you more in lost listeners than a slightly higher monthly fee would.
What to Look For
- Reliability and uptime: Look for providers with a public uptime history and transparent status pages. 99.9% uptime means about 8 hours of downtime per year — acceptable. 99% uptime is 87 hours per year — not acceptable for a station that promises 24/7 broadcasting.
- Listener limits: Plans are typically priced by simultaneous listener count. Estimate your audience realistically — you pay for capacity you do not use, and capacity you run out of means listeners who cannot connect.
- SSL/HTTPS stream support: Modern browsers increasingly require HTTPS for audio streams embedded in websites. Ensure your provider supports SSL streams.
- Bitrate flexibility: Confirm your provider supports the bitrate and format you want to stream. Some budget providers cap streams at 128 kbps or do not support AAC+.
- Server location: Choose a server geographically close to your primary audience. A server in Europe delivering a stream to North American listeners adds latency. Most providers have multiple data centre locations.
- Control panel: A good control panel (Centova Cast or AzuraCast are common) gives you access to listener statistics, metadata API, stream configuration, and backup mount management.
- Support quality: When your stream goes down at 2am, email support that responds in 48 hours is useless. Check whether the provider offers live chat or phone support, and whether other stations report positive experiences.
Server Protocols: Icecast vs SHOUTcast
Icecast is the modern, open-source streaming server. It supports MP3, AAC+, Ogg Vorbis, and other formats. It has an active development community and is the recommended choice for new stations. Most streaming providers offer Icecast hosting.
SHOUTcast (owned by Radionomy/Targetspot) is the older protocol. It has broad support in legacy players and devices, and SHOUTcast v2 is a capable server. Some providers offer both; if you are starting fresh, Icecast is the cleaner choice.