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

I have backups of my backups . . . BUT they're all in the same place, so if a hard drive fails I'm good. If something else happens . . . I'm screwed.

 

Handful of iTunes mixes for the car. That's the only music on the 'pooter. Been there. Done that. Not anymore.

 

Some harsh lessons being learnt over on this thread right now...

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/music-hard-drive-died.699893/

 

I have my music backed up on an external HDD that daily backs up to a more portable HDD. I had it all backed up to Dropbox, but it slowed down my other processes too much once I started using Roon. So I abandoned the cloud idea and take the portable HDD with me when I travel overnight or get a “bad feeling” before going to the movies (I have been robbed so many times throughout my life I have lost count, so my paranoia is engrained into my psyche).

If one of my HDDs fail, I don’t use the remaining one until I get a new secondary.

I still consider myself vulnerable because the HDDs are in the same room most of the time. At least I still own all the CDs, so there is that...but they are in the same room as the HDDs.

 

I have mine backed up. I also have physical copies of most of the stuff I have.

 

The lesson from that thread is: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/music-hard-drive-died.699893/page-8#post-17329367

In other words: BACK UP YOUR DATA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

If my hard drive dies, I'm gonna just get some viagara. But my wife said she already has a back-up hard drive, so I can save the $10. She prefers the physical stuff.

 

googledrive is my ultimate backup for anything I really want to keep. I have a good bit of music stored there.

we have a fireproof safe for documents etc....

Music is backed up on 5 different portable drives but honestly, if it was all gone in a fire.... music files would be the least of my concerns.

 

History is littered with huge companies similar to Google/Apple/Amazon who were too big to fail. All that is needed is bad results in three or four quarters.
A few examples off the top of my head. Polaroid, Atari, Kodak, HMV, General Motors, Chrysler, Enron, Wang, Zilog, Cyrix.

 

Since this post two years ago I did move my main library to a 1TB SSD and probably should have gone with a 2TB as I can see I will need more space within a year. I'm glad the price of SSD have dropped (not as low as I would like). I have two portable 4TB HDD one backed up weekly and one monthly.

 

Back up to a local HD and back up to an online services with unlimited storage. I'd recommend Backblaze for the latter.

 

My digital music collection matters to me so I keep four copies at three physical addresses.

 

I have whatever is on my Amazon music thing. I have a heap on my computer (including my personal recordings)
I have ten dvd's with all my old collection in mp3 format....
I would hate to lose it all, but che sera sera as Julie sang.

why is it that as soon as someone mentions backing up computer files someone always pipes up with cd's can burn ... so what, so can computers

 

The majority of my collection is CD (approaching 4000) along 45s for my jukebox (approaching 500).

Anything I deem worthy to have committed to the external hard drive [that is solely dedicated for my music] is a CD that I have purchased, organized, and stored.

I’ve had a hard drive go out on me about 8 years ago, and while the prospect of setting up everything again on a new drive felt daunting to say the least, I can tell you that if I still didn’t have my source that I curated to put to the new hard drive I would have been inconsolable for a loooonnnggg time at the time -

 

Information on disks gradually vanishes too, or becomes difficult to play.

 

You mean CDRs or DVDr's?
Anything with a sticker/paste-on label will degrade. Back them up, if it is not already too late. The later tracks degrade first, with digital chatter that is unlistenable, if not unplayable.

 

For anyone still using IPods, there is a program out there called Pod Trans, which imports music from the pod back into the computer. Makes an ideal last resource in case hard drives fail. As I have learned over time, IPods are FAR more durable than the average drive..I have had a couple for ten years now. Wonderful devices that of course are discontinued.

 

I keep my whole music collection (downloads, CD rips and hi res needledrops) on my pc and backed up to external hard drives, one of which stays on site and one of which stays off-site.

 

Most of us who have manufactured CDs all the way back to when they were first released. They still play perfectly.

CD-R, which is what I think you are referring to, is unstable and can become corrupt and lose data. It is very unwise to trust them for storage.

 

True, but it is those CDRs with paste-on adhesive labels that are absolutely guaranteed to become degraded. Most are probably already degraded.

The ink solvents in sharpie-pen writing evaporate almost immediately so they will not affect the organic dye compounds in CDR technology as substantially as the solvents in adhesives, which are trapped between the paper label and the CDR and continually degrade the dyes and change their reflectance properties

 

FFS this is 2019. If you don't have automated cloud backups on all your media (music, movies, files, photos, etc.) finish churning your damn butter by hand and get on it.

I lost all my media in 1992. Cat 5 storm, Hurricane Andrew, South Florida. Destroyed our house. Everything gone in an instant. That's never happened to me in the digital age. Not once, not one time!

 

...that's one of the reasons why I've never gotten rid of my CDs, LPs and even tapes. It's nice to have these as a final option should something happen to my cloud and hard drive.

 

That's harsh. I'm so sorry.

 

You've just been lucky that you haven't been treated to the sad face yet.

Mechanical drives will eventually fail, and that includes the ones in iPods.

 

Thanks. I still live in South Florida, lived through a bunch of storms since (nothing like that one though). If another one of that magnitude hits, I hope it just completely levels everything. Having the house flooded, windows smashed, roof torn off, etc. but leaving enough to rebuild is a nightmare. You're better off just losing everything in an instant.