How does an audiophile protect his digital music collection?

I back up my apple lossless itunes library to two different time machine backups.

It is possible though that I am backing up corrupt files. I'm sure there are better systems, but this way has saved me through two hard drive failures.

 

1 drive in my laptop bag
1 drive at the office (also on network storage there)
1 drive at my studio
2 drives at home in my music room
PC hard drive at home

And of course there are the original CD's/DVD-Audio discs, etc. It is mainly HD downloads that would be expensive to replace in the event of a total backup meltdown...

 

I think that is a good idea. Jokingly though why not buy 4 incase the first 3 fail. But that could cause a vicious cycle and before you know it your house get filled with hard drive just because you wanted to backup your music collection. LOL

 

Backups aren't enough. There needs to be repeatable verification to ensure against file corruption.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5

Otherwise, you're just making copies of a damaged file.

There's lots of freeware out there that does an excellent job of automating this process. This doesn't apply just to audiophile paranoia, but to any valuable (or sensitive) digital assets.

 

Thats a great phrase I love it

 

With nuclear weapons.

 

ok so i need to know a the name of a good freeware and how it works.also what equipment do i need? is 2 external hard drives enough? please let us know what you do

 

I think the OP's question is really two fold:
Data protection and data archiving.

Data protection is also multi-faceted for what you are trying to achieve.

Are you trying to build a system that can provide continued access to your data in the event of a device failure?

In the 'industry' you would call this enhanced availability by means of redundancy - which RAID is one approach.

But RAID is NOT a backup...repeat with me RAID is not a backup - it enhances or increases uninterrupted access to data in the event of a single drive failure (or more depending on the level of RAID chosen).

RAID 0 - a simple mirror - is not a backup. Human error can still result in data loss - delete a file on the primary drive and the file is gone on the mirror (hence the name 'mirror) - or if the file system is corrupted on the primary, chances are the mirrored drive will inherit the corruption as well.

RAID 5/6 with parity or multiple parity drives are still NOT a backup.

A true back up is to a separate data store.

Then there is the situation of how long will that drive technology be around with support or when that format is totally abandoned - which is the second part of the question - archival.

Given the rate of change of technology, many data centers face data migration as part of their continued 'conops'.

An individual user may face the same situation. Remember floppies? I still have some around someplace, but no drive to read/access them - but I 'migrated' to a hard drive.

I even once used the cheap Sparq drives, but had to 'migrate' my data when they became obsolete.

Eventually formats and standards go end of life/support and you'll be faced with your own migration effort.

It's all part of Sauron's plan...

 

I should spend the money and set up a proper RAID configuration and all that, but for now I just have an external hard drive with all my files at home, and a clone of it on a 2TB portable hard drive at work. I take the work one home every couple weeks and do a new clone to get new stuff or file tag changes, etc. (I'm kind of OCD about tags and organization). Not fancy, but while drives crap out, the odds of both dying on the same day are pretty slim. When one dies, I'll just order another one for $100 or so, not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

 

Well duh!... that's why you need to backup your house as well...

 

Think of the digital books. You need a deep pockets institution to even attempt to say they will be available in perpetuity. Digital dark age.

 

But RAID will not protect you in the event of 'human error' which happens in Enterprise data centers, both commercial and governmental. That is where the backup protects you.

If you delete a file or some other user oops - its gone from the RAID, or the RAID becomes corrupted or inaccessible.

If you have no true backup, you can't restore your data.

 

I just point bittorrent at my music library files and let the internet be my backup. Anything important in my library will get saved and be accessible by others long after I'm dead.

The reality is that nobody else cares about my digital music collection other than me. Just like nobody else cares about your records other than you. We aren't archiving important cultural history like we're some sort of Smithsonian. We're just average Joe's hoarding music. Fortunately it's much easier to hoard and carry around a large digital file collection than a large LP collection. I'll even be able to bring my library with me to the nursing home all saved on a little drive.

 

You are correct sir. This is the digital age. Microsoft has an app for that it is called "One House" So you dont have to stress about your music or anything else in your house.

 

With a chainsaw and a shotgun.

 

BackBlaze is $50 per year per machine for unlimited cloud backups. That's less than half of what you just quoted.

 

It's super ez to just have 3 drives and mirror them.

 

Cloud storage? Google play?

And who says Google is going to be around in 60 years? And especially all these startup cloud storage places. If they make it 5 or ten years you're lucky. I vote hard drives. I now have some that are officially 20 years old now that sit in a drawer and start up perfectly when I need to look for some old file. Something tells me if you only run them for a few minutes every year or so, they're going to last a very long time.

 

By backing your stuff up. And when technology changes, change with it. And don't complain when your 8 yr old hard drive takes a dump.

 

I didn't know Audiophile's save their collection in to a mp3 ? my vinyl will out live me!
laugh

 

Repeat after me... That hard drive in your drawer won't protect against fire or theft. So much for your bullet-proof solution. If one cloud backup vendor folds, another will take its place.

BOOM goes the dynamite. You'll thank me later.

 

3 is all ill need plenty of space left

 

I have a NewerTech Guardian Maximus drive enclosure with two 4TB HGST drives setup as a RAID1 as my main music collection drive. This is attached to a "Late 2012" Mac Mini running OS X Yosemite. I use this to record music (and needle drops) using an Apogee Quartet audio interface, and to listen to music using an Oppo BDP-105D as a DAC.

I also have a cheapo Seagate 4TB USB 3.0 drive (like $130 at Costco) attached to the machine that I frequently back up to using Synkron.

Across the room, I have *another* cheapo Seagate 4TB USB 3.0 drive that's attached to the Netgear routher via gigabit Ethernet, and I also frequently back up to this using Synkron.

All this is well and good unless the house burns down, of course, so I'm currently trying to find another cost-effective and speedy cloud backup solution (after having been burned by the weasels at Bitcasa). This is somewhat hampered by the size of my music collection on disk at the moment (1.75TB and growing). Suggestions welcome...pondering Amazon Glacier.

 

Cosmic Rays or EMP blasts are a bitch.

My own system:
FLAC ripped with EAC and accuraterip
ZFS to help avoid bit-rot
redundant disk arrays
ECC memory on workstations, SDDC/chipkill memory on servers
ECC protection on NIC buffers (Intel ET instead of CT for example)
Fiber instead of copper whenever you can.
Everything backed up to optical at least once.
One off-site backup that is rotated
One on-site backup that is kept up to date
Periodic re-testing the FLAC checksums
Probably other paranoia I'm forgetting right now.

 

Buy an additional drive. Copy a backup to it. Keep that drive off-site. At a family member's house, at a friend's house, at work, etc. Even if that backup doesn't get updated regularly (or even at all) you'll have a backup just in case your house burns down. That backup may be old and out of date. But at least you'll be able to recover back to that rather than losing everything.

I don't consider backing up 2TB to the cloud to be practical. Most of us don't have an internet connection fast enough and/or an ISP that would allow that much upload due to data caps to be able to do it.