How does an audiophile protect his digital music collection?

I would love the ability to do something like this, but I think Comcast would be upset if I tried to upload several terrabytes over a home account. Last I heard they were telling heavy users they had to buy a business account.

I currently keep a local backup on external drives, but I would like the option to restore from a remote server if my house burned down and everything was wiped out.

 

You won't be able to block cosmic rays much with any reasonable amount of material. I've been meaning to run some calculations on induced voltage/inch to see what I would need to protect against EMPs, but haven't gotten around to it.

The HDD magnets are used to drive the arm that positions the read and write functionality. You can think of how a speaker works as an analogy: current moves through a coil on the arm, and the amount of current moves the arm due to interacting with the magnet, just like how the current in a speaker driver loop moves the driver versus the magnet there.

 

Yeah, they would. I used to have Comcast Business and while it's pretty nice, it's the standard Comcast deal of locking you into a plan and keeping you there despite the fact they're later offer more for less. With Crashplan I'm pretty sure you can actually mail them a hard drive or two for the initial backup and then going forward you just add differentials to it.

 

Wait a minute - you mean your previous statement about EMPs wasn't tongue in cheek? This is really something you're worried about?

 

You mention how one can detect data corruption, and/or possibly prevent it, but you never explained having "seen silent corruption many times over the years".

I've been playing with digital files since the beginning of home computing, and aside from having several hard drives crash over the years, I have yet to see data get "spoiled" over time on a correctly functioning hard drive.

With that said, I do keep many redundant copies of important stuff for better peace of mind.

I would be interested to hear about your "many experiences" with "silent data corruption".

 

Thank you. "basic and easy to use free sync tool" is the thing I wanted.

 

File systems can get corrupted for sure, but I'm not sure that's what we're talking about here.

 

I've currently got my Synology set to backup to Amazon s3, but I've never thrown the switch to start the process. Too many variables in what Comcast or Amazon are going to charge me or how long the initial backup will take. I'll have to look into some of these other services.

 

Amazon is filthy cheap, so I wouldn't worry there. With Comcast it might not be as bad as you think - I get the impression they throttle consistently egregious offenders, and especially when they're using Bittorrent. One month where you have a big spike might not be an issue, especially as they don't have any written policy as best I can tell.

 

I've recently had two USB sticks that have become unreadable/unrecognizable on any home laptop or computer.

And they were all working 'fine' prior to that.

I had a dual hard drive computer - one with the OS and user program files and the other for data files that slowly developed bad sectors and become unreadable.

At work, we did encounter servers with Raid 1 (mirrored primary and secondary drives) that developed file system corruption where the mirror inherited the file system corruption - had to rebuild the servers from scratch and do a system restore from....wait for it...tape.

Yup - tape is still widely used for backups.

 

Sure, that's all file system corruption (edit: and just basic hardware malfunctioning). Like I said earlier, I don't think file system corruption is what we're talking about, but actual bit-level file corruption, a concept that I'm sure exists in theory but in a lifetime of computer use have never observed either at home or in the enterprise.

 

I've had found three files in the last year that were damaged. One was a photo that I had PAR2 information for, so I re-built it from that, the other two I was able to pull correct versions of from my backups.

 

It's something I think about, but I haven't been worried enough about it to do anything about it yet.

 

I didn't know we called failed drives to be "silent corruption"...maybe I am reading too much into the posts.

I've lost a bunch of drives over the years, and even watched a few get wonky and then go bad...I figure that is just the nature of the beast, and that's why I have redundant backups in various places.

I use checksums and whatnot to verify what is going on with the data. As long as the music sounds as it should streaming from my system, I'm going to try and not get more OCD about it than I already am.

If EMP takes out my music library, then there are most likely way more important things to be worried about.

 

Okay, that's fair. My take on it is if a major population center is being hit with an EMP, my music collection is REALLY low on the list of things I'm worrying about.

 

Interesting. Any mitigating circumstances? As I think of it, if there was any file I could see this happening to it would be a photo, image compression seems fragile somehow.

 

My RAID server runs an integrity check every month and was telling me that one of the drives was developing bad sectors. After several months of this I swapped out the drive for a new one. I've never had any of the actual files develop corruption.

 

In Japanese resealable sleeves ?

 

But....you do have an actual backup....right?

 

Exactly. We all agree that music and anything else on a computer one deems important should be backed up, and in the 21st century "backed up" truly means "in a data center". Ultimately, this is the same solution regardless of the problems one is safeguarding against, be it data corruption, fires, zombies, etc.

But bros, when we're taking MD5 checksums and comparing them before we listen to albums, it starts to not feel like a fun passtime anymore.

 

Yes, I run a backup to an external drive every month or two. Then I stash the drive at work.

That reminds me.....

 

Umm - same here!

 

Costco is currently selling 4TB USB drives for $119. Anyone that has a digital collection would be an idiot to not have a backup plan.

I remember when I bought my first external backup drive. An 80GB drive that cost almost $300.

 

Those were the days

FTR, I have a few drives lying around from those days, and the data is still intact on them...at least last time I bothered to spin them up.

 

I was cleaning out the garage last month and ended up with over a dozen bare drives of varying size, from 80GB to 500GB to 1TB. You can pretty much map my backup progression over their years.