Best way to back up your digital music library

I back up to a portable WD external hard drive.

I use MS SyncToy for incremental back-ups.

I probably don't back up as often as I should (roughly monthly) and I should probably have two external drives, one at home one at work (or somewhere else)...

I use carbonite in addition to a local external hard drive.

All my music is on the NAS managed by iTunes on a headless mac mini. I have 3 backups performed on a monthly basis -

2 USB external drives to back up the NAS. One stays home, one is at work.

1 USB external drive with carbon copy cloner used on the Mac. I have this additional one as the NAS backups are proprietary to the Netgear NAS. This at least gives me an incremental copy of my iTunes library i could just plug into the Mac if the NAS was to fail completely. 

Portable HD - kept in another building + on a laptop at home for minor issues

I put everything from my Unitiserve onto cheap USB memory sticks so that I can play them in my car. The last one I bought was a 128GB USB 3 stick, cost £24.99. Rather low tech, but technically, this just about qualifies as an off-site backup.

I have a couple of cheap hard drives and use Carbonite cloud backup. Nowadays, there are probably alternatives to carbonite that are better/cheaper - Backblaze looks good for example - but I haven't got round to changing. Oh, and I use dropbox, (but not for music), which gives our personal files another level of security and is very good. When I do get round to updating my cloud storage, I'll go for a service that offers a couriered hard-drive replacement, and I also occasionally think about putting a hard-drive in a safety deposit box. It's worth taking this seriously; consider what would happen if you lost all your pcs and hard drives - how long would it take you to get back up and running? And how quickly could you disable or re-enable bank accounts etc. in the event of theft?

Just to add, the ultimate backup is all my physical media stored in boxes in a spare bedroom. I just don't want to rip it all again !

I use a belt and braces approach.  Initial rips using dBpoweramp to NAS.  Then TWO backups from that to external hard drives (previously using Syncback Pro on Windows, now Chronosync on Mac).  One kept in a different room, and the other at my youngest daughter's house.  A little bit tedious, and usually means that only the one in my house is actually current until the next time I visit her and her family and swap the drives.

You have three separate costs to consider:

1. bandwidth used for transfer of media content to cloud
2. capacity used for (redundant) storage of media content, typically on a month-to-month basis
3. bandwidth used for transfer of media content from cloud during the recovery process

One can mitigate the transfer bandwidth by constraining the rate by which the content is uploaded to the cloud, say, over a longer duration.

On balance, if you utilize reduced-availability (or so-called "cold") storage, your monthly charges start to get a bit more reasonable; these can be reduced further if you utilize reduced-redundancy storage (i.e., fewer instances of the same media content within the cloud).

And the third cost is where the money is made - if you close your account, there are (typically) no costs involved for orphaning that content; there is no analogy to the notion of physical storage.

I have three copies of everything,  one on my pc, one on a nas  used only for backup and then most, but not all, on my assetnas that I use to stream from. I also back up all of my photos to an online site. This gives me plenty of redundancy, I can stream from pc if I need to in addition to nas, and protects in case a drive dies

I back up to a 2TB WD SSD

Plus all my hi-res downloads are left on my laptop 

Plus I have kept all my CD's

So, what this thread already shows is that we are backing up in quite different ways and sometimes for (potentially) different reasons.

We should be backing up in case we lose our original files (obviously).

But we can lose those files in various ways: hardware failure; theft; fire or other damage.

Point is - there's no point backing up in case of hardware failure if the backup storage device is just as vulnerable to the same risk of loss by other means (eg theft or fire) as the original files themselves. [I am as guilty of this as anyone else...]

The reason I gave up on backing up to hard drives is that every one I've ever used has failed before the device it was supposed to be backing up! I'm sure most people haven't been so unlucky, but I just can't be bothered with them any more.

One thing can be said for sure: only the digital eral brought us thoughts regarding backups !

when we had only CD's and LP's we had no preoccupation about fire or burglers.

Are you doing backups with a history? So eg if you trash a file somehow (it gets corrupt) and you backup this to all of the extrenal hard discs, because you do not see the damage early enough, you have lost the correct file.

I am using dirvish on linux to backup to an external hard disc. It creates one backup directory per backup run. But only files that have changed since the last backup directory are copied again. The others are hard linked so they do not use the whole space again.

A second backup goes to another drive by doing a simple rsync (with --delete to remove old files), so this is a simple 1:1 mirror copy.

But to be honest, I do not feel save with this solution yet. I need at least one external copy somewhere in another location. But first I should do the same with personal paper stuff. ("Papiere" in german) 

Windows File History will do that also. Plug a cheap USB drive into your router, turn File History on, and you're done. Every version of everything you want. 

Mac Mini > RAID Array #1 > RAID Array#2 > Crashplan(Online backup). The RAID arrays are mirrored at my office.

The biggest failure point is HDD reliability and RAID array rebuild time. To mitigate this I do the following:

- Favour performance over capacity i.e. RAID 10 over 5 and 6. Your odds of second failure are higher when rebuilding an array. The faster this gets done the better.

- Run global hot spares on the RAID arrays. If a disk fails a spare is ready to go without any physical intervention.

- Keep a couple of drives on hand to replace any failed units.

- Don't push my luck with drive capacity e.g. buy 3TB instead of 4TB drives. I've always preferred to stay one step behind.

I don't worry much about brand or the differences between enterprise or standard drives. Both Facebook and Backblaze have demonstrated that failure rates in the first few years are low enough that it generally proves more cost effective to replace a standard drive than run a storage array full of enterprise drives.

Here is a post I made last year on the same subject:

https://forums.naimaudio.com/to...65#31133010804273565

It works for me. Probably a bit paranoid, but IMO data is one of the few things you can't replace.

I keep a seperate dedicated backup NAS  on my home LAN for incremental backups, that automatically kicks in once a week, does its stuff, emails me its completed ok, and then sleeps until the following week.

As another stage of backup I keep the CD masters safe and stored, and with hires downloads, I try and buy from service providers that allow me to re download should I need to.

Simon

Sync Toy for me too. Every Sunday.

RAID is useless for enterprise storage at scale, and (frankly) it's probably not entirely useful for domestic use either - stick with JBOD arrays with on- and off-site replication.

Yep. Apple Time Machine provides generational backups. We use local USB drives either direct connected for fixed computers, or wireless via Timecapsule for laptops. All backups are replicated and stored every few months offsite at the office. This bit is manual, though.

Agree with David regarding limitations of RAID. RAID is not backup (by itself). RAID protects against (some) hardware failure, but a deleted or corrupted file will be almost instantly deleted and corrupted right through the array.

I do daily scheduled external drive backups with the NAS.

Planning to deploy to cloud (google drive or Dropbox) in the future.

I use a RAID (Mirroring) configuration in my Synology NAS itself.

My brother keeps an incremental backup of my NAS on an external hard drive, which I bring up-to-date every 2 or 3 weeks.

Over and above this, I keep all of the original CDs, and have copies of all my standard and high-res downloaded albums on my PC.

Now - what do I do with my vinyl collection?  'Cloud Technology' is the answer to everything! Can they upload copies of physical objects yet? Now that 3D printers are 2-a-penny, surely this can't be far off.  

I use a mirrored NAS disc pair. This is backed up to a NAS in a remote location running a mirrored pair of discs. The archive/back up proper is onto a USB HDD which is stored in another building.

I have the original CDs, DVD-As and BDs which are all stored in another building. All downloads, in addition to the backup arrangements already described, exist on my PC HDD which is backed up daily to a USB HDD, along with everything else on my PC HDDs.

I haven't had to make any special provisions for storing and backing up music or videos. I've been backing up data for years. There's just more of it nowadays.