Do you bother backing up the music you’ve bought off of the net?
I do a back up of my whole itunes program to an external hard drive and I have also been burning my purchased mp3’s to CD. But I’m thinking this is kind of overkill.
I’m an IT professional, so I’m a bit anal about my data integrity.
I have all my data stored on a 300G RAID-1 disk set. Every night, that RAID set has a script that runs against it and copies new or modified data to a USB HD. I also burn a select amount of data to DVDs now and again “just to be safe”.
At any given time, most of my data resides on three hard drives.
But hey, storage is cheap - and the ability to automate it the process is trivial.
my stepdad does, but i dont, but he sells pictures as his part time side job
You can buy music on the net?
T.
Maybe not in Scotland? 
Not backing up, as commonplace as it continues to be, is an expensive way to gamble. I know, back up your web-purchased MP3s onto regular CDs! Yup, that’s why I’ll generally buy the CD instead, at least until the MP3s are available in something above 128 kbps.
If you’re not backing up your data, sooner or later you will have a very unhappy day. My music lives on an external HD, as my laptop doesn’t have enough room for it and all my photos. The two backups are my iPod and a set of DVDs I keep at the opposite end of the house.
Yes, for iPod owners, essentially the stuff on the iPod is a backup, or a copy, of what’s in your iTunes music library. In an emergency, you can copy the music from the iPod back into iTunes, but you have to download some 3rd party software to do it.
I have a big, fat, shiny new backup device now, but I haven’t got it all hooked up yet. A Buffalo Tera Station. Four 250GB drives in a network-attached RAID 5 array. That will be the main storage/backup, followed by the older Maxtor One Touch drive as the second backup, and DVDs as the last layer.
Remember, if you back your stuff up to CDs and DVDs, don’t expect their shelflife to be forever. It’s best to check them, or better yet, re-make them every couple of years at the most.
RAID 5 is awesome. I want to eventually get to a nice RAID 5 setup, but there are no decently priced enclosures that I’ve found that support RAID 5 for home use.
Everything that I’ve found that supports RAID 1 at a decent price either runs far too hot or has really poor functionality. For now I’ll just run my mirror off of a FastTrak card in my PC - it’s been working really well so far.
I had one of those unhappy days a few months ago. Goodbye music, pictures and documents…forever. It hurts, and will continue to do so for a long time.
This isn’t going to help anyone not tech-savvy, but in the wake of that disaster, I built a SAMBA server with an 80Gb filesystem in a software RAID1 array using Fedora Core 4 and 100Mbit ethernet. It was a relatively inexpensive project (two extra hard drives built into existing, aging hardware), and not too difficult to configure, either. Now I save everything important to the server over my home network, and I can access all of my files from any computer behind my firewall. It works with both Windows and Linux machines, no problem.
It certainly won’t protect from all disasters (I need to periodically burn DVDs and store them somewhere else to be really safe), but a random hardware failure isn’t going to cause me so much grief, and will be much easier to recover from.
Isn’t it cheaper just to buy music CDs? My music is all “backed up” on the original CDs. Besides, the sound quality is better, and they can be converted into any compressed format I like.
Emphasis on “buy”.
T.
I’m not talking just about music and your computer data backup routine shouldn’t just contain your music either.
For me, I backup the following:
- Music
- All movies (and I have a lot)
- All images I’ve taken - it’s a visual diary of my life
- Email - I have about 5 years of email saved
- Other important docs - resumes, personal info, account info, etc.
- All of my installation media
- All programming projects that I’ve done and that are still in development
- My current webserver root - in case my machine dies I can bring it up on a new machine in short order
All the data above is volatile. If it disappears, it’s gone for good. I wouldn’t want to see that happen as some of it has very sentimental value to me (mostly the images and email).
With purchased music and video that has DRM you need to also be sure to properly backup the licenses for the music too. Just backing up the music files won’t allow you to recover the music. Generally you need to do the backup through iTunes for Apple stuff and Windows Media Player for MS stuff. And be sure to follow the instructions for backing up the licences.
None of my music is DRMed so I don’t have to deal with the license issues.
Here’s my backup routine:
There is still a problem with raid 5. That is that if you have a hardware controller (which is a must for speed), you can still have that piece of hardware fail and you’re out of luck (since the hardware is now outdated and no longer available).
I had a raid 5 setup, but was not made aware when one of the 4 hard drives went offline, and therefore out of sync with the rest. Then a 2nd one went offline and I was out of luck trying to figure out which one was the current drive to set to be active and copy data over. I didn’t lose much data in this event, but raid 5 has been no bette for me than having a single hard drive. Now, I just set up stuff to rsync onto another computer. I may set up a raid 1 (mirror) for my important data though, along with an rsync.
i need to back up my iTunes collection…i have quite a bit of music on there…what is a fairly inexpensive and easy way to back it up? would using those USB flash drives work?
i just burn the stuff i’d still want to dvds. a 4gb disk can hold a ton of mp3s and video clips. once i get some more money an external hdd is the plan. as is another internal. 200gb just isn’t what it used to be.
I have an easy, cheap solution. All of my music is also on my dad’s computer, and spudman’s, and theotherguy’s. If I lose any, a couple hours of hogging our LAN, and I’m fixed.
The inexpensive way is to copy to a DVD or CD. That is still my primary backup method even though I have an external hard drive.
Just be sure to do whatever it is you need to do in iTunes to backup the licenses for any purchased music at the same time you backup the music files.
USB flash drives are still very very expensive on a per megabyte basis compared to external hard drives.
Does it make anybody feel a little bit better to know that a guy who could set up the above, could also allow so much of his data to be not backed up? 
In other words, it could be any of us.
As for the cost of RAID 5 devices for the home, you’re right. But the price of the Tera Station has recently dropped, and will probably continue to do so now that they have a newer version, and competitors aimed at home users are finally starting to show up. Until just recently, all you could get was the Tera Station, or stuff that costed nearly double, or more.
I’ll have to look into the weaknesses of RAID 5 as described by Gilby. Were you saying that one of your drives had died but you were unaware of the fact? I think my box comes with alarms, but of course if its own internal software or hardware has problems, I’m screwed.