[Happy Camper]

If you use an external drive as your music storage location, do you transfer what you want to listen to on to a native drive or do you play from the ext. drive?

-Any benefit/risk to using either method to feed an USB/Firewire DAC thru a laptop?

-How many backup copies do you make and what method do you use?

 

[GreatDane]

I have a cheap laptop. I use a portable USB DAC/amp to listen. I keep my music on a 200 GB external hard drive and connect only when syncing my DAP or to listen to files.

Without the portable amp I would never be able to tolerate the crappy on-board sound. I know there are other options for this but that is what works good for me...I can take the amp/DAC anywhere easily.

 

[mrarroyo]

I have an internal 300 Gb HD which is my primary drive and the one I play off. I also have an external USB 300 Gb HD where I keep a copy of all my music files. I do not use the external to play from just a back up.

 

[ppxnouse]

Quote:

do you transfer what you want to listen to on to a native drive or do you play from the ext. drive?

I do listen to it from the external drive. It is a NAS device, and I can see no need to transfer it before listening.

Quote:

-Any benefit to either using an USB/Firewire DAC on a laptop?

Depends on the "soundcard" that is build into your laptop, but it is very rare that these can compete with any external DAC solution (although I like output of the iBooks soundcard).

Quote:

-How many backup copies do you make and what method do you use?

I have all the music on a raid system + I copy my music and data to some external Firewire HDDs once in a month.

 

[Happy Camper]

I want to see what options and methods everyone uses and why. I will be re-ripping my CDs to higher bitrate and buying larger ext. drives. I want to make a back up to be taken off premises in case of a fire. Would DVD storage be best for this?

 

[slwiser]

I use a backup external Hard drive and play my FLAC files from it sometimes. I use the Acomdata dual firewire/USB enclosure one. The firewire is what I have selected to use since it uses less processor resources compared with USB. I also have two other external drives for a total of 1.2 TBytles of storage, internal and external.

Some external HD are very portable now days.

 

[dknightd]

I keep all my music on external drives.

I backup to other external drives, that stay turned off unless I am actually making a backup.

I also backup to external drives on my office computer (both to provide me music in my office, and an offsite backup)

I'm on a Mac. I use silverkeeper for local backups, and rsync for remote backups. Both free.

I've never heard a built in soundcard that was as good as even a moderately priced external card.

 

[Gatticus]

I have three external USB HDD's and I use one purely for backing up my music collection but I don't use it to play my music from. I have copies of my collection on both of my 2 computers and play them from their HDD's. That means I have three copies of my collection and one is mostly off-line so I am fairly safe from losing my collection due to a HDD crash. I have some backed up to DVD also.

 

[bigshot]

My media computer is a Macbook. Next to my TV, I have two hard drives with a terabyte of storage. That's what I play everything off of, including disk images of DVDs I play regularly. However, I don't count on the hard drive for all of my storage. I maintain a backup of everything on DVD-R. I have about two terabytes of music backed up that way. I have WAY too many records and CDs. The hard drives make it easy to find what I want without shuffling through books and boxes for it.

See ya
Steve

 

[ldj325]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot /img/forum/go_quote.gif My media computer is a Macbook. Next to my TV, I have two hard drives with a terabyte of storage. That's what I play everything off of, including disk images of DVDs I play regularly. However, I don't count on the hard drive for all of my storage. I maintain a backup of everything on DVD-R. I have about two terabytes of music backed up that way. I have WAY too many records and CDs. The hard drives make it easy to find what I want without shuffling through books and boxes for it. See ya Steve

What is your playback program or utility (like iTunes), so you can sort throught all that to what you want? Any suggestions on strategy for setting up a desktop system (Windows) with a couple of 300GB hard drives (and an ext USB 200 GB) and desiring to playback via DAC as well as 80 GB iPod? I know that I want everything in a wav format first. I've got about 1000 LPs and 200 CDs to deal with.

 

[krrm]

I use a separate 250 GB disk to store flac files in my server (Linux) and use nfs to distrubute to other machines (Mac and Linux). Backup is done to external drive usually located at work. I use rsync to do the backup which is a very convenient way of keeping two partions equal. As a temporary backup I use another drive in the fileserver. Have had this setup since about 2002 and it works very well. If I bought more music I would make the backup run automatically.

I had a disk crash on the server once, and it was *almost* a pleasure (disk was nearly full anyway) to restore from backup.

 

[bigshot]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ldj325 /img/forum/go_quote.gif What is your playback program or utility (like iTunes), so you can sort throught all that to what you want? Any suggestions on strategy for setting up a desktop system (Windows) with a couple of 300GB hard drives (and an ext USB 200 GB) and desiring to playback via DAC as well as 80 GB iPod? I know that I want everything in a wav format first. I've got about 1000 LPs and 200 CDs to deal with.

I use iTunes, and I separate music into different iTunes libraries. I have an iPod for each one of them too... jazz, country, classical, rock n' roll, and pop vocals. I have another iPod full of classic cartoons (2000 of them!)

I carefully tag my files using the star ratings to mark favorites and files to delete from the library; and using the genre tag to separate by style and decade.

WAV format is complete overkill for anything except mastering. I would suggest backing up your WAVs to DVD-ROM and playing from AAC. My standard compression setting is AAC 256.

1200 albums is easy. I've got about 365 days worth of music I'm managing!

See ya
Steve

 

[krmathis]

I have a 500GB external FireWire disk, which I use to back up my music etc.
The music I use at a regular basis stay in my PowerBook's internal disk

 

[pedxing]

I think the question of backing up is begging to be answered.

To me, its not a back up unless its a more than normally reliable form of storage, usually meaning the following things to me:
1) The media does not disintegrate or lose data integrity over time. This means all burnable optical media are automatically out. The typical DVD-/+R may have a shorter life cycle compared to the typical CD-R. Perpendicular written hard drives may even considered unreliable too because the magnetic data density may have exponentially reduced the lifespan of the polarity of the data.

2) The storage device is used sparingly as needed to make copies and should be read from for either verification purposes or backup purposes. If you plug in every day to listen to your archive, its not a backup anymore. This reduces the likelihood of mechanical failure from wear and tear.

Of course, if you have like five different versions lying on 5 different drives you turn on everyday, its not so bad. You have some of redundancy to counterattack the wear and tear of every day. Having disk mirroring or other forms of higher RAID would be an acceptable solution too.

Of course, I am a cheap skate and hypocrit and practice none of these.

 

[Fungi]

I have two 250GB drives in RAID1 because I'm paranoid