How does an audiophile protect his digital music collection?

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by tomasgre, Mar 5, 2015.

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  1. TVC15

    TVC15 Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Jersey
    By listening to vinyl
     
  2. beowulf

    beowulf Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chula Vista, CA
    Are there any programs you can recommend for Windows 8.1?

    Thanks!
     
  3. Colin M

    Colin M Forum Resident

    Distribute copies around their friends, for a small fee...


    Federal Prisoner 675442
     
    SixtiesGuy, Starwanderer and russk like this.
  4. johnny q

    johnny q Forum Resident

    Location:
    Bergen County, NJ
    Neophyte question here for sure:. I have a few of the 1 Terrabyte Passports loaded with music and it's long overdue to start thinking about how to protect the collection. Is there any easy, manageable way to copy it over to a backup drive? Simply highlighting the files and doing a "copy to" would take days I would imagine with drives so large. Any tips, pointers or any software available to make this more manageable?? And is there an easy way to verify all he copies went over uncorrupted (without listening to them all :))

    JQ
     
  5. Ham Sandwich

    Ham Sandwich Senior Member

    Location:
    Sherwood, OR, USA
    There are file syncing tools available that handle file copying a lot more robustly than the regular file copy operations. An example for Windows is robocopy (stands for robust file copy). It's a command line utility. There are similar tools with a nice GUI. These utilities are able to verify the copy operations, copy in a way that if a copy gets interrupted in the middle of the process you don't end up with a corrupt file, copy in a way that can recover from where it left off, and all sorts of other more robust features.

    USB 2 drives will take about 12 hours or a little more to transfer 1 TB using an optimized copy with a syncing tool. A regular file copy operation would take longer, possibly up to a full day. USB 3 is up to about 3X as fast. A godsend for syncing to large drives.
     
  6. Schoolmaster Bones

    Schoolmaster Bones Poe's Lawyer

    Location:
    ‎The Midwest
    I'm happy with this: http://corz.org/windows/software/checksum/

    Although I would strongly recommend reading through their info on configuring/customizing it before jumping in head first. It can work just about any way you'd want it to, but you have to have to spend a little time to get it just right.
     
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  7. Dinstun

    Dinstun Forum Resident

    Location:
    Middle Tennessee
    Robocopy, as mentioned, is a powerful utility, but it is command line only, and there are many options to consider. I use it often, but it does not verify that the copy was not corrupted.

    For verified copying, I use the free version of TeraCopy, which is very easy to use, fast, and can automatically do a checksum verification of the copy. This means each file is copied to the destination, and then read back from the destination to verify that no corruption occurred.

    If you are especially paranoid (as I am) you can create checksums on all your files before copying, then copy, then verify the destination using the original checksums.
     
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  8. Raylinds

    Raylinds Resident Lake Surfer

    I guess I'm not the only one who thought this was the setup for a joke. My response would be- They don't they use it as a decoy so thieves will leave their vinyl alone.:cool:
     
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  9. johnny q

    johnny q Forum Resident

    Location:
    Bergen County, NJ
    I am going to check out that free version of TeraCopy, thanks. I read the description on the web and it says it helps speed up the file transfer.
     
  10. tomasgre

    tomasgre New Member Thread Starter

    Guys your attention please :p
    Its hard for me to understand what all of you are saying because of my bad english and the things i dont know like the computer programs you are talking about.
    I will ask a question as simple as i can and i want a simple answer like you would talk to a 10 year old.Otherwise ill give up and just keep saving my files on my two hard drivers.

    So here is the thing.Forget the number of copies of your music collection.Lets say that i have only one(or maybe two if needed) external hard driver.
    The questions are:
    1)how can i check every once in a while that my files are like new-that they are like when i ripped them?
    So in other words i need a program that somehow i will tell to it "here is the original state of the files.If i scan them in the future and something has change then let me know".

    2) How do i fix the file if it has changed? In other words for this fix-replacement,will i need a second backup or is there a handy program can spot the change and fix the file to the original state?

    PLEASE dont start typing a few program names.As i said im not an expert.I need to explain this simple,really simple
     
  11. Ham Sandwich

    Ham Sandwich Senior Member

    Location:
    Sherwood, OR, USA
    I don't believe it is necessary to get too paranoid about file corruption for home use. Corruption doesn't happen very often. Hardly ever. It is possible to generate checksums and monitor for corruption. But it isn't worth the bother. It just ends up making things far more complicated than necessary. What's much more important is to have things easy enough so that backups actually get done. Easy enough that you can manage your files without needing to hire an IT company to manage it for you. Keep it simple.

    If I was managing the crown jewel files for a record label then I'd get far more concerned. Then I'd make sure I had checksums and parity checks and recovery files and all of that. But for home use that sort of paranoia is not necessary.

    For home use a simple file synchronization tool will do the job. A synchronization tool that can mirror a directory tree (your source) to a directory tree on a backup drive. The synchronization tool copies only files that have changed. The sync tools can also do some basic verification that the files get copied correctly and are not corrupted.

    For Windows a basic and easy to use free sync tool is SyncToy by Microsoft.
    Here's the download for it: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15155
    Here's a how-to guide for it: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/7604...etween-computers-and-drives-with-synctoy-2.1/
    Here's a wiki article that tells you more about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyncToy

    With SyncToy you want to do what it calls an "echo" copy. It echos what is on the left (your source directories) to what is on the right (your backup drive directories). It's doing what other programs call a mirror copy.
     
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  12. Schoolmaster Bones

    Schoolmaster Bones Poe's Lawyer

    Location:
    ‎The Midwest
    I would recommend finding a message board oriented toward computer data and file management, preferably in your native language. This really isn't an audiophile issue. There are no simple, easy answers to be found here.

    I wish you the best of luck with this.
     
  13. jfeldt

    jfeldt Forum Resident

    Location:
    SF, CA, USA
    What the two above me said, plus look at Quickpar and the PAR2 file format in general for restoring files to a known good state.
     
  14. William Barty

    William Barty Forum Resident

    <nerdalert>
    Disk mirroring is called RAID 1. RAID 0 is disk striping, which allows higher performance, but actually has a greater chance for data loss because if one disk fails, you lose the data from all of the drives in your RAID group.

    Reference: http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/50148/raid
    </nerdalert>

    That said, the best way to protect a media archive is multiple, separate, unsynced copies of your files in separate locations. RAID and syncing protect you from hardware failures -- but leave you exposed to other types of errors, for example accidental deletions, mass tagging when using library utilities, etc.
     
    Last edited: Mar 6, 2015
    Dinstun likes this.
  15. gregr

    gregr Forum Resident

    Location:
    MA
    I haven't found a good answer for these questions yet, and if you find a solution I'd love to hear about it. I think there's a need for a tool like this. I have found that as music files in my collection migrate, corruption happens over time. Re-ripping is an option for CDs, but with downloads having a clean, viable copy is paramount.

    I get that we're all supposed to be streaming by now, but....
     
  16. L.P.

    L.P. Forum Resident

    Location:
    Austria
    You need at least three hard-drives, imo. When one dies and, while you copy the second one to a new one, lightning strikes and fries your second one... you still have a third one! If lightning then strikes again: that would be really bad luck! You would have to wonder if the god of thunder disapproves of your musical tastes. :D

    As to the problem of solar storms, EMPs etc.: Would it help to store one backup drive in a metal box or a safe or a bank vault or something? Maybe somebody knows about physics and can help out. My father told me that a software developer once asked to build him a metal box with a grounding systems to store his backup floppy discs.

    Another thing: I heard that harddisks are built to be quite invulnerable by even strong magnets, and that there is a strong neodym magnet inside every harddisk for whatever reason, i forgot.
     
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  17. Dr Tone

    Dr Tone Forum Resident

    Location:
    Calgary, AB
    Every time you run the needle through the groove, vinyl gets more and more corrupted. That's not much of a solution.
     
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  18. reddyempower

    reddyempower Forum Resident

    Location:
    columbus, oh, usa
    I have two HDs at all times. Each year I buy a brand new one and copy everything to it and the oldest drive gets used for work or some other purpose. So everything is always backed up to a drive less than 1 year old and a drive less than two years old.

    If they both should fail at the same time- well that would be just too bad.
     
  19. Tyler Eaves

    Tyler Eaves Forum Resident

    Location:
    Greenville, NC
    I just use spotify and tidal. Collecting digital files is for the birds.
     
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  20. TVC15

    TVC15 Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Jersey
    But those aren't digital files, Dr Buzzkill.
     
  21. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    Sure, and I think Amazon's super-slow version of S3 is even cheaper then that. Finding the lowest possible cost wasn't my goal.
     
  22. russk

    russk Forum Resident

    Location:
    Syracuse NY
    Russia could detonate a nuclear bomb in orbit over the U.S. and the resulting electromagnetic pulse would destroy all your lossless files or at least make them sound much less open and decrease the soundstage.

    Pretty sure I heard that in at least two James Bond films.

    Anyways lol. I dump my files on blue ray discs for back up and have a couple of SD cards that hold all my music and I can swap them out on my surface pro 3 (which is ridiculously awesome for computer audio). I've been thinking about using Microsoft One Drive. Technically I already do since I have a surface pro and Microsoft Office. I've got 1TB but have never used it for anything outside Office.

    @Rolltide Can you use your Google Cloud storage to post pics on this website?
     
  23. Linto

    Linto Mayor of Simpleton

    Keep the discs.
    As for downloads, surely cloud is the way to go these days.
     
  24. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    @russk I'm 99% sure you can. I'm the least picture-taking person I've ever known though, so probably the worst guy to ask. Google cloud storage quota works across all of their products, so it definitely ties into the photo storage product.
     
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  25. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    Really IMO if you're worried about the bits slowly falling out of order, your best bet is not to waste your time on elaborate MD5 checksum measures, but just to have a plan b. If I lose an album due to file system entropy, I'll rip it again. If for some reason I don't have the disk, I'll buy it again.

    Before somebody tells me that would be a waste of money, consider A) this isn't something that's likely to happen, B) time is money, and I'd rather just spend $10 to address a very unlikely problem if/when it happens then spend so much extra time to safeguard against a problem I'm unlikely to have.
     
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