How does an audiophile protect his digital music collection?

So,many people the last years are making their own digital music collection by ripping cds and vinyls in loseless format or mp3 320kbps.Soon mp3s will be gone because storage devices will be cheaper.
Now we need some "scientific" knowledge.An audiophile will have at least a second copy of his collection.
We know that digital files are written in a computer language using the digits 0 and 1. We also know that electromagnetic waves can change these digits which means that can change the file.In theory a solar storm could affect the digital files.
Except from replacing our storage advices every five years what else can we do to protect our digital files?
Ofcourse by the time the files will be corrupted we may be dead but this still sounds bad.
Can you make our music "immortal" once and for all or will we always have to maintain it every once in a while?

 

there are 2 types of hard drives, ones that have failed and ones that are going to fail. with that in mind make back up drives of the stuff you want to preserve and maybe think about keeping at least one offsite in a safe place. storage is pretty cheap so no reason to lose everything.

 

you are right but what i find as a problem (and if im not wrong) is that a file can change through time even if the hard drive has not fail and that because of the electromagnetic radiation

 

The 'Master' is on a 2TB drive in my main desktop computer. It is backed up nightly to a RAID array stored in the back corner of my basement.

Every few months I drop the entire collection to an external USB drive and mail it to my friend on the other side of the country. He does the same so we swap the same drives back and forth.

 

In addition to hard drive backups, I create error correction files for my FLAC files using MultiPar: http://multipar.eu/. This will let you know if a file has changed and will be able to correct it if there are more correction parts than corrupted parts.

 

Incorrect.

 

This question partially drove me back to analog. I have 60 year old albums that play like new. I don't expect anything digital that I have to be functioning in 60 years.

 

Pass a strong magnet over your hard drive. Then check if all your files are still good (assuming the filesystem is still intact). I know this is an extreme example, but corruption does occur, especially when files are copied, and often with no indication of a problem.

 

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/

In addition to hard drives there are many cloud storage solutions if you prefer that. Amazon, Google etc.

 

I use Google Drive for my music collection backup, $9.99/month gets you 1 TB. I think Amazon might be cheaper for their slower service. Be prepared for your initial backup to take a couple days with any of these services.

 

What reasonable scenario are we worried about where this is going to happen though? Having to worry about "bit entropy" on files on drives over time is silly.

 

FLAC files on my NAS Raid 5
FLAC files also backed up on an external USB drive for at work. I update it once a month.
Automatic Crashplan backup of all my FLAC files. Crashplan has versioning so if something got corrupted and made it to my external USB drive, I could get the original version back from Crashplan.

I have about 4TBs of music.

 

It's been laid out many times, back up back up back up and keep at least one back up off site.

 

Maybe. Having seen silent corruption many times over the years, I've grown a little paranoid about it, although modern systems have improved the situation considerably. Using RAID 5 or some such drive mirroring is a good idea.

Anyway, FLAC files have automatic MD5 error detection, so at least you can test whether a file has been corrupted.

 

I don't expect me to be functioning in 60 years.

 

You could run checksums on your files. That generates a unique number that represents the content of the file. If you run checksum again in the future, you'd know the file had changed. If you keep multiple copies of a file, the checksum can let you know which are still valid. Here's how that looks on a Mac. There's tools for Linux and Windows as well:

dhcp-9-41-222-198:Abbey Road (Blue Box) [vinyl_] aaron$ cksum *
3464905497 24758854 01 Come Together.m4a
3236972298 17206295 02 Something.m4a
3208916135 20891273 03 Maxwell's Silver Hammer.m4a
3254429354 21465207 04 Oh! Darling.m4a
2789036763 16889749 05 Octopus's Garden.m4a
1510568626 47732827 06 I Want You (She's So Heavy).m4a
1792049842 19378837 07 Here Comes the Sun.m4a
685340825 15952807 08 Because.m4a
3812432000 22669882 09 You Never Give Me Your Money.m4a
2203606866 12811087 10 Sun King.m4a
3943872600 7719482 11 Mean Mr. Mustard.m4a
2064618067 8599127 12 Polythene Pam.m4a
2120403913 12907529 13 She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.m4a
3945128879 7874310 14 Golden Slumbers.m4a
272849514 9881020 15 Carry that Weight.m4a
556971627 13384935 16 The End.m4a
2510131369 2623872 17 Her Majesty.m4a
dhcp-9-41-222-198:Abbey Road (Blue Box) [vinyl_] aaron$

This command runs in seconds and if either of the first two numbers have changed from what you have recorded elsewhere then you need to replace that file from a backup. It might take a few hours to run this for a large collection, but the entire process can be automated. You could even schedule a job run periodically to re-verify your files.

Maybe I should go write an app that does this…...

 

silent corruption? what is this and how you knew it happaned?

Guys i aprreciate your suggestion but im not an audiophile expert.I have not idea what MD5 or raid 5 is. Can you simplify the problem? How this error detection works? I think ill need a guide link or youtube video

 

I've seen corruption copying files from one drive to another but that was a crappy VIA chipset issue quite a few years ago. The only way it can be found is by the loud squeeling and beeps heard when playing back the files.

 

Google music allows you to store 50,000 songs for free (but FLAC file are converted to 320k mp3 format). But again it is free and allows you to stream to your phone.

 

If you have ripped your discs using dbPowerAmp, Spoon (developer) has an app called PerfectTunes that will checksum your files against the accurate rip database to see if the hashes matches.

 

two questions
1)will google keep your files "forever" or is there a time limit for the storage?
2)what about the copyrights?

 

XLD does this also if you open a folder as a disc.

 

MD5 is a method which can be used detecting data corruption. FLAC uses this automatically, so any FLAC file can easily be tested for corruption.

Although MD5 can tell you if you have corruption, it cannot fix it. This would be error correction. The MultiPar program mentioned above can create separate parity files, which can be used to do both error detection and error correction. Within limits, it can restore a corrupted file to it's exact original state.

Disk mirroring (or RAID 0) is a method of using multiple hard drives for redundancy in the event of a drive failure. The mirrored drives appear as one drive, but if one drive fails, the data is still completely intact on the other drive. But you only get 50% storage capacity of the original drives.

RAID 5 is similar to disk mirroring, but requires 3 or more hard drives. The hard drive space is used more efficiently however.

 

1} as of right now it is free with no limitations, Their is always the chance they could change their minds, but for now it is free.
2} I don't know. That info may be in their "Terms of service" I didn't check. I have had no problems streaming my music that I own and ripped. So I would think there are not any copyright issues

 

3 hard drives