Best way to back up your digital music library

Posted by: wilro15 on 05 November 2014

Curious as to how people are backing up all their digital music... I am backing up to a NAS drive at home but I am interested to know what other options there may be. For instance, if I get burgled or my house burns down then I lose everything. Does anybody use a cloud/online service to backup their precious music? I've looked around at various cloud services but they look expensive in the long term.

Posted on: 06 November 2014 by GregU

Originally Posted by nickpeacock:

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...]

I just feel that there are only so many things in life to worry about. I don't worry too much that my house will burn down. But I take it into account. In the very small amount of time I worry about my house burning down I worry about 1) My dog....2) My house....3) My furniture somewhere way down on the list to a point where it is imperceptible is "what about my digital music collection"

Thus I just back up occasionally on 2 separate hard drives.

Posted on: 06 November 2014 by pcstockton

Originally Posted by phosphocreatine:

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.

Not entirely true. Before anything else, on first listen, I used to ALWAYS record the vinyl onto those nice heavy Maxell blank tapes. Mostly so I would have a pristine backup, no scratches, and also could be used in the car.

This was of course in the 80s when punk and hardcore was typically only available on vinyl.

Posted on: 06 November 2014 by DavidDever

+Originally Posted by pcstockton:

Originally Posted by phosphocreatine:

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.

This was of course in the 80s when punk and hardcore was typically only available on vinyl.

Posted on: 06 November 2014 by Harry

Posted on: 09 November 2014 by mudwolf

Stupid question from technically challenged.

I have a Synology214 I haven't finished with my CD transfers yet. Also SSD Server

Is a NAS different from the Raid?

I was going to copy the 214 to another raid and take that out to my other place in Palm Springs.and will set up a UnitiCute till I move out entirely.

Posted on: 09 November 2014 by DavidDever

The NAS is the box itself, RAID / JBOD is the manner in which the drives are configured for redundancy / throughput / storage capacity.