Who'll admit to having a "vulnerable" digital music collection?

I'll admit to having a questionable digital music collection.

 

An out-of-town technician was just in my store and asked if there were any vinyl stores in the region. He had lost a couple thousand LPs to a fire back home.

 

I have a digital stuff, but its not the bulk of my overall collection. And actually, I kind of don't even consider it as part of my collection, but stuff I have temporarily until I get it on CD. So if I lost it all, it would suck but it certainly wouldn't ruin me. I do have a couple things I have 2 backups of, but that's stuff that's download only and not on CD at all.

 

I'm ok
Got 4 bay NAS 20 TB
4 x external 2 TB drives
2 x PCs full as well

 

I've got 2 back ups. One at work, just in case.

I don't worry about s*** like that.

Imagine your LP or CD collection going up in smoke?

 

I have my complete CD collection on iTunes. There's nearly 16000 songs on there now. Nearly 4000 of those are not backed up, so I do need to get that external hard drive plugged in again soon.
Every time I add content I send it to a playlist marked 'Not backed up', so as I know where I am.

 

this is good...I have something new to worry about...
I need to backup all my music...I wonder how many external hard drives I would need though...

 

I have a local backup of my music collection (Mostly flac) and a cloud backup on Amazon unlimited. Not a bad deal for 60 bucks a year. I have a bunch of other stuff there too. My audio collection is around 1 terabyte. It took a while to get it all up there but I was able to do it during the free trial.

 

My 'digital music collection' consists of approximately 250 MP3s. Zero lossless files (maybe you can hear the difference, but I sure can't). No back-up. Don't think it would take much effort on my part to replace those 'priceless' 'collectable' computer files, should they ever go missing.

I do have around 8,000 vinyl LPs (most of which I haven't listened to in ages) acquired over the last 50+ years. Also have around the same number of CDs, which I do listen to all the time.

 

lost a bunch of vinyl thanks to a flood - stuff happens - some years ago, but had it catalogued, so homeowner's insurance was a blessing... of course, finding replacements can be a hassle... and its certainly a different kind of a back up, but passing the thought along

 

As far as digital media is concerned, I'm not fussed. I used to obsessively burn everything I downloaded onto disc for backup, but I rarely download anything anymore and it all goes in the cloud anyway now. Spotify is a wonderful thing. I can stream almost anything I want to hear.

In terms of physical media, I don't own anything that couldn't be repurchased in the event of fire or flood. If everything got ruined, I would probably just go full digital anyway and perhaps keep a small collection of my absolute favorite albums.

It's really not something I'm very concerned about. If my house was on fire, I wouldn't be thinking about which albums to grab. I'd be grabbing my cats and my husband and letting the rest burn.

 

Does he know that's the order?

 

Backups are the first step.

Have you tried testing restoring to see if it actually works?

 

I did restore a chunk of my Amazon backup (That I didn't have backed up locally) when my external drive decided it had no partition. It reported as RAW in Windows. I found a fix that may have worked but I screwed up by doing a "chkdsk /f".

 

This is my setup as well.

 

My 2 Tb FLAC library is reproduced on two different external hard drives.
I know, I should make a third copy to store OUTSIDE of the house.

 

Yo.

 

My whole collection is in thedce.com. The physical item (vinyl, cassette, CD) sits in their fireproof warehouse and can be reclaimed at any time. Then I have digital access to my entire collection.

 

Ignore it. You are probably safe. Nothing bad ever happens to guys named Jimmy.
Do you store all/most of your music on a computer hard drive?

 

Mine's vulnerable in the sense that all my Nas server backups are on encrypted ext3 formatted drives... and I haven't got a clue about Linux. If my Nas hardware ever fails then I'm vaguely concerned that I could be stuck with 8Tb (4Tb onsite, 4Tb offsite) of encrypted bricks unreadable on my PC or Mac machines. Suppose it has to be possible to setup a sort of Linux bootcamp on my Windows machine?... that's something I do need to look into further.

 

I have a second hard drive but I still find CDs and vinyl that I could have sworn I ripped that I didn't. Most of them are on the cloud as well.

 

It is kind of funny that digital files should really be the least vulnerable media of all... easily and relatively cheaply backed up. However, many people approach backups as a "someday" kind of thing.

As others have said, if you ever suffer a major loss of data, you will become a backup advocate immediately...

 

I've got about a dozen hi res albums in FLAC and about another 50 FLACs, all but 8 of which I still have the CD of but none of my downloads or rips are appropriately backed up. I have lost, over the last couple of years, 4 albums that I only had digital copies of.

Have to say though that I go back and fourth between ripping FLACs of all of my CDs and collecting downloads from places like HD Tracks and playing them off SD cards loaded into my Surface Pro 3 (main reason I got it) through my Rega DACr and playing actual CDs.

Anyways. Digital is a convenience for me. I prefer vinyl.

 

My kid says the same: you're not backed up unless you have at least four copies, and keep them in multiple locations. Which I also do for my business.

So, my internal hard drive, Backblaze cloud service ($5/mo), two external hard drives (one with the contents of my iTunes Music directory of MP3/320 and one with AIFF 16/48-or-better), and 2x/year I back it all up to physical DVD-R (about 60 disks). Plus the original vinyl and CD in cases where I have those.

I spent too much time entering metadata and finding hi-res album cover pix to lose all that to carelessness!

 

I have a second hard drive too, mainly because a significant amount of albums that I keep are Lp digitized but never published on cd.