How to back up your Serato library properly.

What your Serato library actually consists of

• The audio files — including your cues, loops, beatgrids, BPM and key, which Serato embeds in the files' tag data
• Crate files — one per crate in ~/Music/_Serato_/Subcrates, with your folder hierarchy encoded in the filenames
• database V2 — star ratings, play counts, date-added
• Smart-crate rules — in a separate SQLite database under ~/Library/Application Support/Serato (not in _Serato_ at all)

A backup that misses any one of these gives you a partial library back — usually discovered at the worst possible moment.

Why Time Machine isn't a DJ backup

• External drives are excluded by default. If your music lives on an external SSD — like most working DJs — Time Machine likely isn't touching it at all.
• It restores state, not structure. You get back a point-in-time blob of _Serato_; you can't browse it by crate, pull one crate's tracks, or hand a folder to another DJ.
• It faithfully preserves corruption. If your database was already damaged when the snapshot ran, that's what you'll restore.
• Cloud sync is worse: Dropbox/Drive syncing a live _Serato_ folder while Serato writes to it is a well-known way to cause corruption.

The manual backup method

1. Quit Serato (never back up while it's running).
2. Copy your entire music folder to the backup drive.
3. Copy ~/Music/_Serato_ to the backup drive.
4. Repeat before every big weekend — and re-copying everything each time is the tedious part.

The one-click version

CrateVault does the complete job in one pass: it copies your music to any drive organized as real folders that mirror your crates, captures ratings, colors, play counts and smart-crate rules, and re-runs in minutes because it skips unchanged files. It never deletes anything from the destination. And when you need it, Restore rebuilds the whole library — crates, rules, ratings, fresh database — on any Mac.

The rule of thumb stays the same either way: back up before the weekend, not after the disaster.