Long-term storage and backup of digital music files

Not funny, you know.

 

The evals I've read do not reco SSD for any kind of long term storage.

 

I find this topic of interest and trust that you make a good point.
But, I don't like homework. Why do I need to go find old publications that I would be unfamiliar with?
Wouldn't you be able to cite a resource or two?

 

For WHAT? Disaster recovery? Small scale data loss? Write-once/Read-Many applications such as medical imaging? Speed-sensitive? Data intensive? Encrypted?

At the home-consumer level, digital tape just stopped working for consumers a long time ago.
And now with hi-res, where 1 album requires a 2GB backup, the home user is getting a taste of the corporate pain of trying to run an optical farm.

Still, tape has the problems it has always had: physically and magnetically vulnerable, serial seeking, small faults resulting in losing the whole shebang. As a home user, I say "Keep it." I've lost far more data to tape's problems than CD, DVD, or MOD.

 

Like what? are you worried Amazon or Google will suddenly go out of business without warning? That a hurricane will take out an east coast data center at the exact moment an earthquake takes out its redundant west coast mirror?

 

Well last year there were 6 document denial of service attacks on corporate players including Facebook and Twitter.

There were also DNS outages last year.

I'm just saying that if you want access to your data for connectivity - sometimes it's going to be a crap shoot.

It isn't just the data stores, but the infrastructure behind them up to that 'last mile' to your end point.

No thanks - not going to rely on them as my main source of music.

Oh - and I'm on my second cable modem reboot for the week cuz of problems (and the modem has already been replaced twice).

 

They shoot RAID controllers, don't they?

 

Well that's good, since we're talking about backups in this thread, not main sources of music. This is good for both of us, as it can put you at ease and I won't have to explain that Facebook and Twitter aren't cloud storage companies.

 

My point is that if one relies on 'the cloud' as your sole backup service (and all the other inherent services required to get to 'it'), it is probable there will be 'interruptions'.

A local backup strategy would not rely on that, and probably would be quicker.

All the pros and cons should go into 'the pot' for consideration to decide what works for you and what doesn't.

 

How old is your local backup? How often do you update it? Do you do it based on time since the last one, or the amount of new music you've acquired since the last one? How often do you check the local backup to make sure it's still working? How often do you replace the hard drives? How formalized is your process to attend to all of the above? What are some things you'd prefer to do instead of fussing over a local backup strategy? As you say, all things to include in 'the pot'.

Now, in your case, it seems you have a terrible internet connection, so it follows you have less faith in the internet. It's been years since I had an internet outage, so I just let new additions to my music library automatically mirror to the cloud. Even 2GB DSD rips upload in the background incredibly fast without impacting anything else I'm doing. That's the state of the cloud pot. You're right that the decision looks different for different people, but I don't think you're giving the concepts equal credit.

 

I sure wish I could rely on my internet for a cloud backup - and a faster one at that.

But even so, I just have this 'control' issue - so it's a local strategy for me.

 

Ridiculously expensive. It's much cheaper for home users just to backup to lots of standard hard drives.

And remember, if you don't have a backup offsite - preferably far offsite, like half a continent away - you don't really have much of a backup.

 

Exabyte 8mm tape held up to 3.5GB on a single tape in 1987. That was before modern writable CD formats were defined, let alone became common. The specification for CD-R wasn't even published by Sony until 1988.

Data8 - Wikipedia

CD-R - Wikipedia

At no point did optical discs catch up to tape in terms of storage capacity or transmission speeds, and they likely never will. Which is why enterprises never used them for backup or offline archival purposes. It has jack squat to do with durability. In my experience with enterprise backup and restore over the decades I've dealt with databases, tapes actually aren't particularly reliable themselves, although on a per-gigabyte basis they might be somewhat more reliable than optical discs.

Logistically though, there's no way optical discs, with their lower capacities and slower transmission speeds, are ever going to be the choice for most enterprise use, even if they were more reliable.

For home use though they can be an OK option for the occasional archival backup (like if you want to burn a copy of your whole library to some Blu-ray discs and drop it in your safe deposit box for safekeeping, "just in case"). But cloud based solutions are so much easier and cheaper, I can't imagine why anybody would bother these days.

 

Burn your collection to Blu-ray and use Amazon Cloud Drive which is $60 a year for an unlimited amount of storage. Combine that with multiple hard drives and you are covered 99.99%.

 

And how often or when all you re-evaluate your long term storage plan?
Your post is reasonable for short term, but 20-30 years from now?
I am looking thirty years down the road and retirement.
I don't want to live without all the music I have acquired, and won't easily find online.
For some of us, these are hard to find or out of print CD, for others there are one of kind needle drops painstakingly made. For others this is homemade or live rcordings.
And for others, they could be family photos and videos(very unique and personal).
I am not worried that LedZep or RollingStones or Taylor Swift or JayZ will not be available in the future.

 

Who cares about 30 years from now? In 10 years petabyte thumb drives might be available, and you could carry multiple copies of your music library in your wallet.

You choose the best backup solution based on today's needs and technology. When better technology comes along, you migrate to that. It's not complicated.

 

So
sorry.
I thought this thread was entitled "
Long-term storage and backup of digital music files
"

 

The best "long-term" solution for the money is the best current solution. That'll do the most to preserve your data until another, better solution comes along (which is sure to happen in a few years).

 

Your planning is based upon believing that something better will come along. That's fun.

 

When has something better not come along in the world of storage technology? It's been improving dramatically, year over year, for decades.

If all progress should suddenly, inexplicably stop, today's best solution would therefore become the best solution forever, correct? So it still makes sense to go with today's best solution.

Not. Rocket. Science.

 

The best solution for the money is not necessarily the best solution overall. And that comes from reading your posts in this thread.

I came here to discuss the topic, not argue. Enjoy the weekend.

 

If money is no object, then all sorts of solutions present themselves. But it isn't clear if those solutions are going to be any better longterm than the cloud storage options available to us mere mortals.

 

I did some more research on this. There is a version of Blu- ray that they say last 200 years...Verbatim M-Disc.

I'd also think it is unlikely that Amazon and the Internet will not exist in 30 years.

 

It's entirely possible both Amazon and the Internet (as we know it) won't be around in 10 years, let alone 30.

However, neither is going to vanish without warning overnight. Or rather, anything that would cause them to do so would be so disruptive, your music collection will be the least of your concerns.

Any backup solution you choose now will be superseded by a superior solution - actually a succession of superior solutions - over the course of three decades.

A "long term" plan for the backup of digital music files will inherently include the need to migrate to newer, better solutions at regular intervals (and also to monitor the status of any existing solution currently implemented).

 

I found some of the ideas expressed to be practical. Here are some of my own:

http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/2017/02/i-read-thread-on-audio-forum-about.html