I looked at my media array earlier, a little over 11TB of content now.

I wouldn't even consider primary media storage that wasn't fault-tolerant. AFAIK, that means RAID.

My music library (all FLAC, mostly 16/44.1) is about 320gb total. I store it on a 1tb Western Digital Caviar Black in my PC to free up room on the SSD.

mike-48 said:

I wouldn't even consider primary media storage that wasn't fault-tolerant. AFAIK, that means RAID.

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+1. RAID has saved my bacon twice - all hard drives will fail; it is just a matter of when - and whether you had a fresh backup or not when it threw in the towel...

RAID (and an off-site backup, in case of fire/burglary/lightning strike/whatever) is a cheap (-ish) and simple way to mitigate the risk of data loss and the associated hassle.

My god O_O.
 
I have over 2,000 songs and all of it is in lossless 320kbps, I even have a few Alac from CDs that I bought, in total? 28gb
 
What the heck guys

All of my media is triple backuped on external drives.  I may have multiple copies of the same album in various formats, but most of it is FLAC.
 
1 - Main drive via Firewire where i play most of my music. This drive is firewire800 to avoid saturating the USB bus for my DAC.
2 - Primary Backup on a NAS
3 - Deep backup on a USB3/Lighting Drive that is NOT plugged in unless I'm loading on or off it.

Wait a minute. I answered 250-500GB. My actual number is about 425GB.
 
But that's just my digital media. I've got about 2,000 vinyl records sitting here, which I also play frequently.
 
If I were to digitize them at an average of 24 minutes/side, 192kbits/sec, 24bits/word, that would be another 138.2GB, if Wolfram Alpha and I have done our calculations correctly. Well, I'm betting Wolfram Alpha has done its bit right.
 
So that actually puts me over the top. Is there a way to amend my response?

kokomo o said:

  Wait a minute. I answered 250-500GB. My actual number is about 425GB.
 
But that's just my digital media. I've got about 2,000 vinyl records sitting here, which I also play frequently.
 
If I were to digitize them at an average of 24 minutes/side, 192kbits/sec, 24bits/word, that would be another 138.2GB, if Wolfram Alpha and I have done our calculations correctly. Well, I'm betting Wolfram Alpha has done its bit right.
 
So that actually puts me over the top. Is there a way to amend my response?

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-Either WA or you are off, I think - 2000 albums, 24 minutes/side each in 192/24 would be (192000*(24/8)*2*(60*24*2)*2000=6TB and change.
 
Then again, you'd be well served ripping them in 44.1/16, for a total of (44100*(16/8)*2*(60*24*2)*2000=slightly less than 1TB.
 
And by all means, spend some of the $$$ saved by reducing sample rate and bit depth on a robust backup solution. You really, really do not want to undertake that business twice...

Yeah, I figured I'd made a computation error; 138GB just seemed light and I was going back to figure it out when I took a look to see if anyone had set me straight.
 
I don't want to get into the whole resolution debate here. It has gotten real old. But you're right, whatever resolution you use, you'd want both on-site and off-site backup for that amount of data.

I have about 540GB of lossless CD rips (all flac). That includes cover/booklet scans, playlist files etc. That is also backed up and kept synced to a different physical drive, so a little over 1TB in lossless audio.

Then I have about 116GB of downloaded web radio (mostly high bitrate aac from BBC) and a few podcasts. That figure fluctuates wildly as I discard stuff, and I back up/keep just some of it.

Then I have about 75GB of audio books (mp3,ogg) which I occasionally add to and even more occasionally remember to sync to a back up....note to self....

This is all easy at home. Away from home I switched from storage based players to an Android device and VPN client over 3G so now I just VPN into my home LAN and it's all available and streams to UPnPlay or even a folder based audio book player exactly as if I was at home. No transcoding or file copying performed. Total music storage capacity required while mobile: zero. It still feels like magic.

200GB of FLAC on my 400GB RAID1 freenas server synced to 600Gb partition on my Ubuntu system drive.

My main system consists of 5.4 Tb NAS server (RAID 10), with everything mirrored on two sets of 3Tb bare drives.  The sets are swapped out regularly between the home and storage vault.  Even if I lose everything at home (including my CD collection in the garage), I can rebuild it from the set in the vault (barring Zombie Apocalypse).
 
Currently I have:
5,303 Classical CD's (ripped to FLAC)
2,279 Jazz CD's (ripped to FLAC)
1,896 Rock/World/Etc CD's (ripped to FLAC)
iTunes has 5,394 mp3 albums (most are complete albums).

Personally I don't mix music and movie storage.  Music is on SSD, movies are on HDD, and I tend to use my dedicated music computer for music, and my laptop or tablet for movies or TV.  This allows better optimisation than trying to have a mixed purpose machine.
 
Music is 125-250 MB, movies about the same.

My sizable CD collection (well over 2,000 CDs) takes up around 835GB stored as Apple Lossless.  Various MP3 and Apple Audio files libraries take up another 350GB plus assorted high-res downloads another 50GB (only a small collection so far).  This is all audio (and may I add all of it legally purchased!).  I am starting putting my DVD collection online and estimate that this will take another 1TB or so....

pytter said:

  My sizable CD collection (well over 2,000 CDs) takes up around 835GB stored as Apple Lossless.  Various MP3 and Apple Audio files libraries take up another 350GB plus assorted high-res downloads another 50GB (only a small collection so far).  This is all audio (and may I add all of it legally purchased!).  I am starting putting my DVD collection online and estimate that this will take another 1TB or so....

Click to expand...

I should add that I am not in any way insinuating that anyone on this forum has not legally purchased their music!!  Obviously if you have the cash to invest in ttop end headphones, amps and DACs, you also have the money to pay the artists you listen to!  Sorry if it seemed I was suggesting otherwise...