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

Just find a Linux distribution that can be put on a USB stick and boot your Windows machine from that in the event of a disaster - you can probably download an image and make a bootable key ring with a little Googling - no need to permanently install anything in your actual machine.

 

Why on earth would anyone not keep a backup? I keep six backups! It only makes sense!

 

Because people are ignorant of common computer practices and don't now any better?

 

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

I guess a Record/CD collection is just as vulnerable to fire/flood or theft.

 

Backblaze, Dropbox, Google Music, and the most important rips on my private remote server.

All of it instantly recoverable.

Backblaze alone would suffice, and that's $5 a month.

Meanwhile anything and everything physical can be lost, scratched, damaged, destroyed, STOLEN... I love my record/CD collection but I have *EVERYTHING* backed up digitally. With all these tools available you'd pretty much be a fool not to.

 

I know it is easy for you to imply that those who don't backup their digital files are fools.
From an educated position, it certainly seems crazy, right?

Yet, many people don't even think about digital backups, or take it seriously.
Why is that? I think some of the people in that group are aware of the risk and prepared to accept that risk of not having a backup. I believe that most of the non-backup are simply not well-enough informed.
I think using the word "fool" is a bit unfair.
You know better that backups are required to protect your stash, and I know better, too.
I don't presume the case is with the others. I may be wrong.

I do know that I have way too much invested in time and money in 50,000 song collection to not have backups.

 

This is true but the value of the content of the media is declining every year - when music became digital it became infinitely duplicatable for less and less cost - that is to say, the cost of replacing it. The physical media, however, must increase in value, demand remaining constant, if it cannot be (authentically) reproduced, and as individual items degrade or are lost. That is why I believe, long term, physical media will remain collectible in a way that a file of bytes will never be, and the most collectible/valuable will be those physical items with the smallest production runs - certain officially released discs... and bootlegs.

Of course, none of that matters if you simply enjoy the music for what it is... and I try

 

And atom bombs, don't forget those!

 

I have exactly nothing backed-up. I still live like it's 1978.

 

That's exactly why I backup up actual files and never use incremental backup schemes. It would be a real shame to do a system backup and discover when you needed it that it was useless. The problem is that there is no easy way to test them.

I use cloning when I get my computer to where I want it, and this is not a problem. In that case I can boot from the backup and be assured of the state it puts the computer in, assuming, of course, that the cloned drive didn't fail.

Regarding my music files, I consider myself pretty bulletproof.

My collection fits on a 6TB drive, and my main drive is a WD Black Cavier. I have two other 6TB backups as well as a 6TB Synology box. I can put most of my music on 4TB drives so I also maintain a 4TB master, which of course is a subset of the 6TB master. I have (8) 4 TB portable usb powered drives. I keep one in each of my cars to supply the mobile systems.

The remaining portable drives are all kept updated as I add new albums, and yes it's quite a production to keep them all up to date, but it's a labor of love. When I travel I often carry a back up with me, just in case a drive fails. I don't lose any data, due to all the home backups, but I could lose my music for the remainder of the trip.

While we're on it, I also keep backups of each component of my mobile systems. Each car has an 8" windows tablet, and I have also two backup tablets that I keep current. This way, not much can keep me from my music for very long.

I also have a complete data set with my audio partner, and that's always current as well. I even have a data set at mom's place, but sadly it won't be there for much longer.

As for being without my music, that's pretty unlikely. I also run JRiver / Gizmo so my phone has access to all my music wherever I have service though it's limited to a 320k stream. That said, it sounds just fine with bluetooth headphones, though I don't have all the nuances that the lossless files have, especially the hi-res ones.

These are my golden years and I'm lazy as hell. I don't like to do things twice, so I take extreme measures to make sure I don't have to. Yes it takes a lot of time to maintain but as I said earlier it's labor of love.

 

I got my first external hard drive this year and have been loading it up and having fun listening to music in my collection that I haven't heard in years. About 90 percent of what I've loaded so far I still have on CD. The rest are downloads that, frankly if I lost them, I wouldn't really miss them that much. One thing that having a hard drive has taught me is that I have way more music than I can listen to for the rest of my life. I'm just enjoying what I have right now.

 

But, have you actually proved you can do a restore.

I was in the Data Center 'business' and we were thoroughly convinced we had 'backups' until we had to do an actual restore - and faced a slap in the face that the restores didn't work.

It's one thing to say "oh sure, I do backups", and another to say you can REALLY restore.

Verify you can do a restore.

 

I'm not sure why some posters are attacking the OP about physical media. It goes without saying a fire/robbery can cause loss of anything and everything including our life. That's not the point of this thread.

A lot of folks simply don't think about backing up their digital files. They take it for granted that it will always be there, just like our health. Then one day it happens. My first computer was a G3. I'll never forget that day it crashed. I didn't know computers did that. I also didn't realize my files were gone forever until I got the phone call from the service place I dropped it at. Being a digital artist I lost all of my art. Backing up large files was more difficult back then unlike now.

Most of us learn the hard way like I did. But I think we can all agree that there is no bullet proof method. Heck, I've paid for expensive programs that I can no longer use because current operating systems don't support them anymore. Backing them up doesn't help with that. Things change and we have no control over that.

All the same, digital music needs endless care and dollars to maintain its safety.

 

My physical media is more vulnerable than my digital-only media, at this point.

 

Another thing I like to do is to backup my data as soon as I update it.

For example, every time I back up Quicken, I also do it to a network drive. Then I can load Quicken on to a second computer and restore data from the network backup. That's another verification, and an additional path just in case you corrupt your backup file. Just backup again from the second computer and you're good to go.

I do the same with my calendar data, and it's extensive and covers most of my life. I do it with all data that is important to me, and I keep it all the data in a common area so it's real easy to back it all up in one fell swoop. Of course by that time it's backing up backup data. But I also keep a set of all of that off site as well.

I like backing up real files that can be used by real programs, not cryptic data sets that you hope will work but you can't test it to be sure.

 

I have a lot on CD and Vinyl, but the rest is just stuff I have in my Google Play library, purely via streaming. Obviously it freaks me out a little that stuff can go away any second, but I'm also a poor college student that lives over 2000 miles from my school, so Google Play is just the way for me to go, at the moment. Once I get settled down after school, I'll go back to really growing my physical library.

 

Not digital, but when I went off to college I took 30 LPs with me and left 300 in my dad's basement... which flooded.... and I looked at all my original pressings with the covers wet-matted to the vinyl and nearly cried.

 

I wish I had digital backups back in 1992. Hurricane Andrew destroyed our neighborhood and did serious damage to our house. While I was away at grad school, my Mom decided to wallpaper my bedroom, grabbed my extensive vinyl collection and moved it into the garage... which was promptly flooded and gutted by Mother Nature. MAN I had some amazing stuff, imports I purchased in Spain, England, Germany, and Israel, bootlegs, cool stuff from flea markets and garage sales... gone overnight. It breaks my heart to think about it. I need a cold compress...

 

Eventually the sun will become a red giant star, and Mercury, Venus and Earth will be no more when that happens.

 

People who have been using computers for a long time likely have a memory of turning on their computer and it not finding a boot drive. Once the drive has died, all the contents are gone with little chance of ever getting it back. Once that happens to you, you learn the importance of a good backup real quick. Now that we have ransomware, if you get hit, all your data is encrypted (on all connected drives). Even if you pay the ransom, there is no guarantee of getting your data back.

 

Some small chance if it was a conventional spinning disc and you are willing to pay to retrieve the data. No chance at all if it's a new-fangled solid-state "disc".

 

I don't know about that. I just think it's logical to back up stuff just in case. Oh, wait...people aren't logical...

Whenever I buy some music, the first thing I do is back it up, even before listening to it.

 

there are very few recordings that you couldn't torrent with little problem.

 

I have about three backups for everything. Here's the kicker: they're all in the same place!

 

The circle of life…