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

Indeed, I've had mine fail on me. Hence the multiple backups and, finally, a physical copy.

 

I'm originally from Tampa so I can relate having watched my sister's house survive while her neighbors was destroyed by a tornado. Flooding was also an issue because of the proximity to swamp land a couple of miles away.

 

Backups are NOT enough. I'm a DBA and have been going on 30 years. Unless you test your solution, an unproven solution is no solution. There are several facets... Backup, restore, and high availability. We should all be striving for a HA solution using some form of redundant storage that stripes your content across multiple disks so that should there be a failure optimally you're replacing the disk with no interrupt. I use Drobo attached to a Mac Mini server. recently i lost a disk. my array was up, available, and usable. I just yanked out the old drive , put in a new one, and the array auto incorporated the new storage device and striped across it.

 

My worst nightmare. I have 22,000 songs on my laptop hard drive; and have 4 synched hard drives in different locations to make sure that nothing is ever lost!!!!

One is always at my office, two at home and one always with me in my briefcase.

 

I have most of my digital on a hard drive . Once the drive crashed and i had to start all over again. Great fun !

 

I have a fairly large vinyl and CD collection. But I rip most of my CD's to my iTunes library on my laptop. But whenever a new CD I want is available from Amazon with an Autorip option, I go that route, so that, should anything terrible occur, I'll have at least part of my library ready to retrieve. I also have several iPods. But obviously, as someone else mentioned, a house fire would likely take all of them, as well as my computer.

 

[Thinks back over a dozen+ years of choosing only inkjet-ready (paper-on-top) discs.]

Somebody kill me.

 

I lost all my CD rips once. Have been much better at backing it up since!

 

I'm not a very technical type, but sometimes there are solutions if your hardrive or PC crashes.

I had a harddrive give out and added it to the junkpile in the garage. Later I found out about how you can retrieve data with some cables and software from a corrupted hard drive.

So, google around and experiment if your HD dies, you have nothing more to lose.

 

Disclaimer: I am a guy with maybe 100,000 LPs and maybe 60,000 (80,000?) CDs. And an ungodly number of CDRs and countless data-DVDRs loaded with both flac and mp3. I am also a guy with maybe 40 external hard drives, many 8TB. Many things are cloned.

But, life is too short to worry about all of that. Your imagination is all you need. If you live long enough, your hearing will decline to the point that you cannot enjoy listening to music. All you can count on at that point is whatever imagination and memories remain.

Conclusion: Don't fret. Beauty is still all around us, all of the time.

 

I have copies of my ripped CDs on two separate external drives, as well as the original physical CDs. But no offsite backups, so I'm certainly vulnerable in case of fire.

 

my humble advice: the stuff you really like burn to dvd.

hard drives are prone to blow up.

 

Isn't Neil Young archive library near a major fault line?

 

Surely it's waaaay less labor to copy everything to a spare hard drive (better yet, several spare hard drives). Also, I wouldn't be too confident about the lifespan of self-burned DVDs. Not sure if they're better than CD-Rs in this regard or not, but I have numerous CD-Rs burned 10+ years ago that are no longer readable without errors.

 

I backup all my digital purchases on several hard drives.
Especially the ones you can't re-download again (e.g. the Springsteen Live archive, unless you pay for the stuff again).
Actually I should backup my CD-rips more but I still have all the original CDs, so...

 

What is your method for keeping one off site? Do you bring it home once a week to backup or have a remote method?

 

I have a lot of it lossy on my phone and most of the FLAC on my PC, which doesn't have a proper backup. Some of that collection is stuff I had to dig really hard to find...

 

I have started the process of transferring tons of data on data-dvdrs to hard drives, and giving all of the data DVDs to a friend (they take up much space) and ultimately cloning the hard drive itself.

There is only so much fussing that you can do.

 

Definitely make a back up, in whatever way.

 

No way, 2 seperate copies of everything always.

 

I like to offer friends a clone of one of my hard drives. My drives are arranged by musical style.

 

the best bet is to burn to dvds.

 

I put all my flac stuff on CD and have thousands. CD ROMs don't last forever, and that is my biggest concern. Fire and all bets are off for me. I should start putting all this stuff on hard drives, my more recent flacs are hard drive only. No interest in cloud storage.

 

But it's mp3.

 

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