Check and Test Your Backups!

Richard, glad your back up process worked for you and the music collection was saved. There is nothing more infuriating than data loss, I know to my cost having lost a load of family photos a couple of years back due to a less than competent back up plan.

A cloud based back up is an interesting idea, and I did look at Backblaze a while back but the prices were quite high (then). I think Apple can also extend iCloud storage as well, so may look at that.

I have a new My Passport 4TB drive winging its way to me, and may even buy a third to store at a relatives house for that extra layer of protection. 

Just a note on "cloud backup" ... there are some companies that do "unlimited cloud storage" (Virgin Media did that a few years ago as part of one of their bundles) but don't underestimate just how long it would take to back up a decent sized music collection - say 4TB - to 'the cloud' ...

Cheers

Phil 

Good point Phil. We are lucky to have decent net performance here - roughly 80Mbit/s upload & 20Mbit/s download speeds, but even with my modest music collection (just over 1TB) I would assume it'd take quite some time to backup to the cloud - possibly even days.

Yetizone posted:

Good point Phil. We are lucky to have decent net performance here - roughly 80Mbit/s upload & 20Mbit/s download speeds, but even with my modest music collection (just over 1TB) I would assume it'd take quite some time to backup to the cloud - possibly even days.

Hi,

I presume you mean 80Mbits/s down and 20Mbits/sec up? (The other way round would be very weird...)

20Mbits/sec up would be roughly 2.5Mbytes/sec (assuming that you are able to continuously saturate your uplink only with backup traffic) ...

1TB is 1,024GBytes or (1,024 * 1,024 =) 1,048,576MBytes ...

at 2.5 MBytes/sec, 1,048,576MBytes would take 419,430 seconds or 6,990 minutes or 116.5 hours or 4.8 days.

So assuming that you get your full bandwidth and don't get any throttling anywhere then you're looking at 5 days at best for 1TByte - real world I reckon you'd not get anywhere close to that.

Phil

Yetizone posted:

 We are lucky to have decent net performance here - roughly 80Mbit/s upload & 20Mbit/s download 

I dream of having more than 1.5 Mbit/s in either direction...

Phil Harris posted:

Yetizone posted:

Good point Phil. We are lucky to have decent net performance here - roughly 80Mbit/s upload & 20Mbit/s download speeds, but even with my modest music collection (just over 1TB) I would assume it'd take quite some time to backup to the cloud - possibly even days.

Hi,

I presume you mean 80Mbits/s down and 20Mbits/sec up? (The other way round would be very weird...)

20Mbits/sec up would be roughly 2.5Mbytes/sec (assuming that you are able to continuously saturate your uplink only with backup traffic) ...

1TB is 1,024GBytes or (1,024 * 1,024 =) 1,048,576MBytes ...

at 2.5 MBytes/sec, 1,048,576MBytes would take 419,430 seconds or 6,990 minutes or 116.5 hours or 4.8 days.

So assuming that you get your full bandwidth and don't get any throttling anywhere then you're looking at 5 days at best for 1TByte - real world I reckon you'd not get anywhere close to that.

Phil

Yes, correct, the number stats were the wrong way round! Good grief. With the amount of evening household activity spent online, there would be no chance of exclusive uplink access for the initial backup. Cloud storage not a realistic option just yet then.

A couple of points to follow my last post:

(i) I use Carbonite for my online backup and they do offer unlimited space but it will only backup your local PC but not any USB attached disks either.  You can do the full hog but I don't bother.  I have 3 massive disk drives in my PC and use MS SyncDrive to backup my music (and other network files) and then let Carbonite do its business.

(ii) Of course it will take a long while to backup say 1TB but you don't need to do anything and it did not have a great impact on my PC while it was doing the first massive backup.  So do not worry about this.

(iii) Do not under estimate how much protection a UPS will give your server!

One other little point regarding Minimserver (which I think is great) and transcoding/gapless playback.  Surely the gapless functionality is something your streamer does not your server and I find that if I transcode to WAV I have no problems using Miniserver on a QNAP NAS into a UnitiLite.

Gapless requires support from both the Player/Renderer and the Server and requires them to cooperate.

Huge posted:

Gapless requires support from both the Player/Renderer and the Server and requires them to cooperate.

Don't think so.  For example iPod Classics support gapless playback from any source.

Maybe iPod classics only support playback from sources that support gapless playback (either by design or accident)?

So apart from data downloaded to it's own local storage, from what other servers does it support a real time feed?
(I always thought that with the iPod classic, everything had to be downloaded first, but I may have got that wrong.)

Huge posted:

Maybe iPod classics only support playback from sources that support gapless playback (either by design or accident)?

So apart from data downloaded to it's own local storage, from what other servers does it support a real time feed?
(I always thought that with the iPod classic, everything had to be downloaded first, but I may have got that wrong.)

A little while ago I got very interested in the whole thing of music streaming and still am actually.  My first aim was to be able to change tag info on a batch of FLAC files based on various criteria and I produced a set of programs that have been useful.

I then got the idea that I would like to produce a media server running off my QNAP.  This was only to be a little experiment because I was then and still am using the brilliant minimserver and it was obvious to me that such a project would involve many hours of work for no discernible gain.  But I wanted to play!

My first step was to produce a server that did nothing visible basically, but it accepted a minimal set of commands from the control point/renderer.  For example, I implemented a browse() command in the 'Content Directory Service':  OK it only returned an empty set but it kept my Unity and an iPod happy.

I then got the browse() command to return a list of a dozen tracks (it just returned a hard-coded set) and after implementing the required command in the 'ConnectionManager' service then lo and behold after a few days work I was able to play stuff from simple server.  You have to remember that a lot of functionality is provided within the upnp standard itself and I had the required libraries.

The thing is that my UnityLite is able to do gapless with this ridiculous little server.  The only requirement on the server that I could see is that it had to be able to implement multiple ioStreams - or the stream I created which extended the iostream class.

An interesting little diversion which now I am retired becomes fun and not work!

Indeed, that is the case for UPnP, but some servers (particularly those operating remotely across the internet) don't even provide the ability to provide overlapped streams to the same renderer - it sounds as thought your server was more competently written than some of the commercial ones!  

Huge posted:

Indeed, that is the case for UPnP, but some servers (particularly those operating remotely across the internet) don't even provide the ability to provide overlapped streams to the same renderer - it sounds as thought your server was more competently written than some of the commercial ones!  

Very much doubt that!

I've seen some dire commercial code (and had to sort some of it out!), and you are a highly intelligent person; it doesn't surprise me at all that you're more competent!  

Just don't talk any of my past clients!

I'm certainly not clever when it comes to understanding IT.

With photos or documents on my PC I can copy a file or files from the hard drive to a usb hard drive, then from the usb hard drive to another usb hard drive. I can then store the drives in various "safe" places. I can do the same if I use Windows to back up the PC as a whole.

So, with my Melco N1A, backup means plug a USB drive into the unit, scroll through the menu and click start backup, go to bed, and its done.  My IT dummy logic says it should then be able to take that drive to my PC, copy the contents to two more drives and hey presto.

But I cannot. So, should I be able to? I can work on the backup drive to delete folders, add album art where there is none or the image does not match the disc I own, so to my simple thinking it is not the fact that (I think) that the Melco is Linux based, or the USB drive is formatted differently ....or is it?

If anyone has an answer, can you make it step by step please?

The backup from the Melco is probably in a Melco specific format; as a result you can probably only restore it to a Melco (the same one or a different one).

Quite often these backups are incremental, (that is it keeps a base level file and then records changes to these files so that you can restore the data as they were at an earlier time).  This has the advantage that you can 'undo' changes that prove to be a problem even if you've done another backup (or several backups!) in the mean time; the disadvantage is that the format for recording the changes will usually be specific to the manufacturer.

You can copy the Melco backup files onto a PC, they're not in a special format. They're buried a couple of layers down (sorry, not at home at the moment so can't guide you through this).

There’s always discussion regarding backing up data stored on a hard drive but I can’t recall people discussing scheduled replacement of a hard drive.

A couple of months ago I replaced a 2TB drive in my PC that I use to store all my music and photos. The old drive hadn’t failed, but I had noticed it was taking a long time copy some of my ripped music to the NAS. As the drive was approx 5 years old, I didn’t waste any time trying to fix the problem, I bought a new 2TB drive for £55 and did the swap at my convenience. Stress Free.

If I replace the new drive after 5 years, it will have cost me £11 per year.

Check the disk using a S.M.A.R.T. parameter tester; it will detect most conditions that indicate that a disk failure is likely or is imminent.

fatcat posted:

There’s always discussion regarding backing up data stored on a hard drive but I can’t recall people discussing scheduled replacement of a hard drive.

A couple of months ago I replaced a 2TB drive in my PC that I use to store all my music and photos. The old drive hadn’t failed, but I had noticed it was taking a long time copy some of my ripped music to the NAS. As the drive was approx 5 years old, I didn’t waste any time trying to fix the problem, I bought a new 2TB drive for £55 and did the swap at my convenience. Stress Free.

If I replace the new drive after 5 years, it will have cost me £11 per year.

 

Did you regularly defragment the disk?  Cos' a highly fragmented disk will be much slower than a defragmented one.

Huge posted:

The backup from the Melco is probably in a Melco specific format; as a result you can probably only restore it to a Melco (the same one or a different one).

Quite often these backups are incremental, (that is it keeps a base level file and then records changes to these files so that you can restore the data as they were at an earlier time).  This has the advantage that you can 'undo' changes that prove to be a problem even if you've done another backup (or several backups!) in the mean time; the disadvantage is that the format for recording the changes will usually be specific to the manufacturer.

I've just had time to look and be more specific.

I have three WD My Passport drives, they are NTFS formatted. The Melco does incremental backups. Using a Win 10 PC, if I open the WD drive, one folder is called .anais.bak

If I then click through five layers I get to import CD which contains folders for each artist. I can work in this folder, usually to correct artwork. Or I can copy the artist folder to the PC hard drive.

What I was hoping to do was (to obtain the recommended three backup drives) highlight .anais.bak and copy then paste it to drive two and three. My reasoning if I swop each drive connected to the Melco and backup, it creates a new log on the Melco. I'm not sure if this is a problem or not. Then, following a domestic house fire at a friends, we are listening to the local fire safety officer saying turn off all appliances at night.

I have a Melco HA-N1ZH and I could never get the incremental backup to work, every subsequent backup was a always a full backup

I contacted Melco but got know where as they ultimately stopped replying

The Melco does do something strange as Windows Explorer reports incorrect folder sizes, something to do with symbolic links I've been led to believe

Use SageLinks or WinDirStat to be certain of any properties

As you say it doesn't appear to proprietary, just be sure before you rely on any backups