Long-term storage and backup of digital music files

One step ahead of you I'm actually pretty sure the sweat was already on my forehead by the time I got to the Best Buy checkout line. The new drive that I got that day for the purposes of transferring everything onto, I also dumped everything else from my then-current drive onto that new one so it too could officially be "retired". It was getting a bit long in the tooth anyhow (that was the drive I purchased 8 years back when the old enclosure failed in the first place!)


So now with everything from allllll the drives now all on one 4tb drive, the one I "retired" is in storage and currently has a somewhat recent mirror of the new one. Yes it's old but I trust it to be okay, for the time being anyhow. It's some level of redundancy, which is what counts.

I plan on retiring the new disk fairly soon too, as I intend to put together a more reliable/modern raid-1 NAS setup when funds allow. So when that happens, the newly purchased disk will too be filled with a backup, "retired" and put into storage elsewhere, serving the same purpose. I'll keep both backups up to date periodically, for as long as they're functional anyway.

 

Be very careful with FreeFileSync. The program itself is good and has a nice UI. Unfortunately the Windows installer for FreeFileSync has gone evil. The installer bundles in crapware that will get installed if you're not careful about unchecking that option during the install. Some of the crapware the installer pushes is just absolute crap awful software that no sane person would want on their computer. But the FreeFileSync installer bundles it in anyways. Absolute crapware that will make your computer miserable.

Because of that crapware I no longer recommend FreeFileSync.

If you absolutely must use FreeFileSync you need to install Unchecky. Unchecky is a free program that will monitor installers and uncheck special offers (crapware offers). Unchecky will uncheck the offers in the FreeFileSync installer. But still be careful. Because it's possible the installer could change and try to install something that Unchecky won't catch. So be careful and watch carefully every time you run the FreeFileSync installer. Be on your guard.

 

Does anyone have experience with RDX drives? Seem to be a good solution for the offside backup.

 

If anyone is using SSDs for long term data storage of purely data files that just get read. I would recommend a full alphabetical sort defrag at least once a year. Yes they say you shouldn't defrag a SSD as it uses up writes but to be honest that's pretty much irrelevant. The reason for the defrag is purely to 'lift and shift' all the long standing data so its re-written and 're-energised' in the flash.

It's what I do and it has caused no issues in 5+ years of SSD use.

 

SuperDuper! for backups; the MD5 stuff is custom Unix shell scripts, written with generous assistance from folks here on the forum:

Anyone good with Unix commands on OS X?

 

yay.....

Here's some new SSDs for portability....NOW...if they can just have a long, long lifetime !!!!!!!

These may be just what I need....I've been watching !

SANDISK EXTREME 600 SERIES | B&H Photo Video

 

Interesting - I wonder what the price will be...

 

I like the 250g and the 2TB one.

I've seen Samsung portable USB SSDs that are less than $500. I hope these Sandisks are competitive....and I'll be looking at their "suggested lifespan". I know they put 10 years and 'infinity' on some of their thumb drives. Surely with the idea of 'storage'....and SSD technology they'd build them to last. Depends on the integrity of their marketing dept. I guess and who gets the responsibility of deciding on longevity.

That 2TB is gonna be available in March IIRC.

Thumbs are crossed !

 

I'm still on mechanical HDD's.

I suspect SSD's will be in my future, but still cost and size-prohibitive. For the moment.

 

Have you looked into Samsung ? Not too expensive really...

I have just about all my cd's in WAV format on a 3.0 2TB Seagate external spinner and hope to migrate all of that onto a new 2TB SSD, again...if the projected longevity is good enough. At 2.0 transfer rate...it would take many hours...a 3.0 connection should be much quicker. I don't have a 3.0 computer yet...but can gain access to one or I'll get one eventually,

 

I'm watching those links you posted.

But my current 2TB FLAC archive HDD is likely going to need to be upped to 3TB soon, I'm getting into the yellow zone as far as space free. I have eSATA and USB3, but I guess I'll have to think about USB-C eventually when I upgrade my desktop.

 

USB-C and Thunderbolt are the way to go. M.2 is also great for boot drives. The next mobo you get will certainly have most or all of these options. M.2 is becoming standard.


As for SSD, i'm looking at 500GB drives. The good thing is that prices are coming down...for now. But, like you, it's still going to be a spinning platter for my growing FLAC archive. With prices the way they are, i'll probably just go for the T4 for the heck of it.

 

Well, I just watched a BBC America report about using DNA to store data. One of the scientists interviewed stated that all of the data on the internet would take up a mere shoe box if converted to DNA, and it would be permanent, dense storage. Essentially you are converting ones and zeros into DNA code. In fact, parts of the BBC reporter's story had been converted to DNA and back to digital to demonstrate how it worked. All of the ones and zeros checked out, with no errors or loss in the conversion/re-conversion process. The summary was that within five years a company with very sensitive data and plenty of finances may be able to explore this type of storage, and consumer-grade DNA data storage will become a reality within 10-15 years.

Our problems are solved!!!

 

Yeah! We CAN take our collection with us!!!!

 

Lots of hospitals government agencies and insurance companies use MDisc optical media for archival purposes.
That's right........MDisc....up to 100gigs of data per BD for a period of 1000 years life expectancy!
On one BD disc.

 

Yes
Nano storage is where everything will end up

 

HDDs are quite cheap these days and 4TB of music (or data in general) to be archived would not be prohibitive from a cost perspective. I think three copies on different drives should be sufficient, ideally one to be store offsite. You can have the offsite drive in a bank vault, at a friend/relative house or even at work. RAID is probably not a good idea, since mistakes will be duplicated. As someone else mentioned, cryptolock malware would be the biggest risk with multiple drives.
I am not sure if online storage is worth considering in the long run. By that I mean 10+ years. Who know if the company is still going to be in business And your fees may add up.

 

I'd be quite cautios with the 1000 years of expectancy. Not that it matters, but the media should last a few dozen years though.

 

And they play these disks back on......what?

 

Any Blu-ray player.

FWIW, I'm augmenting my 2X local backup + 1x offsite backup with 2 cloud storage options: Google Drive and Microsoft's OneDrive (both should be around as long as I am ). Both relatively inexpensive. With 5 backups, I'm feeling pretty good!

 

Who cares if the company goes out of business. It's a subscription service. If it goes away, just create a new backup on another service. "Problem" solved.

Anyhow, Apple, Google and Microsoft are all getting into the online storage business. As prices drop, that'll become a viable - and likely permanent - solution.

 

I’d say that they are well past “... getting into ...”


Regardless, I don’t use cloud services for my music library either.

 

Google and Microsoft aren't really positioning themselves as consumer "backup" solutions, though - not yet, anyhow. It's more about cross-device document availability. In the case of Google, buying enough storage to backup a whole audio library is costly. Microsoft will give you tons of space if you're an Office 360 subscriber, but doesn't yet have tools like Google Sync to make using it as a backup plug-n-play easy.

Apple has iCloud, which is something of a backup solution for customers. But it's still spendy, and also more focused on cross-device availability.

The writing is on the wall though, as storage costs continue to decrease.

 

Do you know if other cloud services will ship you a drive to do the initial 'upload' to their cloud storage that you then send back to them?

Otherwise, it could take a LONG time to upload depending on the amount of data and the upload b/w you get from your ISP.

I only get about 8 Mbits/sec upload from Wrecktum.

 

Yeah, it sucks if you have 1990's levels of connectivity like that.

CrashPlan used to allow you to send them a drive, but they've dropped out of the consumer business. I guess their small business plan allows for it, but it's kinda spendy.

I'd make a physical backup and store it offsite, and then sloooooowly begin backing my stuff up to a cloud provider, if I was stuck with 1990's DSL speeds.