Digital Music Library Backup Strategies

[JKL2000]

I have a Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB HD. It’s amazing how compact and light it is compared to every other HD I’ve ever had. But I’m actually not sure if it’s a spinning hard drive or solid state - has to be a spinning one, right? It’s so quiet. An amazing thing at a great price anyway. My first external hard drive was 40GB!

[Jerjo]

It's not a solid state but it is a nice little drive. I got one last fall.

[jkelman]

Sorry - I know I've posted pretty much this same question before, but I finally bought two bigass external hard drives - 4T each, so they should be big enough to fit all my music, or at least as much as I can ever manage to rip, verify tags, and copy to them.

The second one is so that I can have a backup of the first one. Do any of you use automated backups to backup from one external drive to another? I'll probably do all the copying to the first drive manually, although I suppose if I always rip to the same location I could have new stuff automatically copies to the first drive.

How do you guys manage this? I might do it all manually, but I'd like to at least try to automate it.

I got Seagate Backup Plus drives or whatever they're called.

Since my other post was when I first got my iMac four years ago, an update would, I think, be in order as my disk farm has changed significantly.

I backup my music twice: once, because my itunes library resides on one of two really bigass LaCie drives that are set up as RAID 1, which means that my 12Tb drive really looks like and really is 2x6Tb drives, automatically mirrored to both discs. I've also got a 16Tb one, thus 8Tb mirrored.

Using a Mac, as I do, I was able to take some other, older, smaller drives, and concatentate them together (i'm sure you can do that with Windows, but after four years I've forgotten much of what I knew about Windows, plus have no idea as to its current version), so that they look like one big 9Tb drive to OSX, meaning when Time Machine is backing up to them, it automatically manages splitting things across those concatenated discs. I use that to backup specific stuff along with my music library, like my (large) photo library (also on the RAID drives), documents (though more and more, they're on the cloud unless of a sensitive nature, in which case I store them on the internal drive on my Mac), etc.

There's a bunch of stuff I don't back up, because it's duplicated (for good reasons I don't need to go into), so are getting backed up (and, if they're on my external LaCie drives, mirrored), so I'm covered.

But it's great. If one of the RAID drives craps out, it fails over automatically to the other until I replace the defective one, then it re-mirrors itself automatically. The backup i use is OSX's Time Machine, and as a backup package, works great. So I'm covered twice. They say you shouldn't count entirely on RAID'd drives, thus backing them up is also suggested. So, between my internal 3Tb fusion drive in the Mac, 6Tb RAID 1 and 8Tb RAID 1 drives, and a 9Tb backup drive consisting of three drives concatenated together, I'm totally covered. Also, if anyone is thinking of going RAID, you're better off to use hardware RAID - either built into the drive or with a chip on your computer's motherboard. It's faster.

But it really works. The only thing I don't have is an offsight drive with my backups. Truthfully, if there were to be a fire (tough in this 40 year-old, all-concrete floors, walls between apartments and ceilings), I'd quickly grab my backup discs (they're in a stack), along with my Mac. That would be my first grab, along with my cats and wife, of course. Everything else, like my audio gear, is replaceable, so my data comes first, er second, to my family

[Scott Bails]

One of these days I'll educate myself about a good RAID system. I have a plain backup to a second hard drive, but that doesn't have the bells and whistles (and security) of what I imagine a RAID system would have.