[Spyro]

As my music library gets larger I worry that if my computer crashes I may lose all of my music. Funny I worry more about the music that other files. Go figure.

Any comments on what is easiest or what does everyone else do?

 

[steviebee]

It's all on CD...er....so I don't!

(winner: most useless post of the day competition!)

 

[scompton]

My music library is about 250G including lossless and lossy versions of the same music. I keep two copies on USB drives, one at home and one at work. When I burn a new CD at home, I take the files to work on a thumb drive.

 

[_j_]

I use an external 500GB USB drive to back up my files and media nightly ~ the last thing I do before getting in bed is to turn on the drive then run the back-up which is already pre-configured.

I use a software program called 'BounceBack' and have no complaints with it. I am able to back up 3 seperate drives on to the 500GB USB drive and the back up has come in handy several times already. While I have not had any disk failures, I occasionaly find files that get corrupted in my library.

My father uses a RAID configuration and mirrors all of his data to it on an external network 'enclosure' type drive.

 

[NiceCans]

When I built my present PC I kept my old PC for use as a back-up machine.
When I bought new (larger) drives for my media files I moved the drives I was replacing to the old PC (which is now loaded with several drives of 200 to 300gb capacity each). Occaisionally I run that machine and do a backup so that all my media is safe.

In addition, if I had a problem with my main machine I could always resort to running the old backup machine to get by. So I not only have a data backup, I have a hardware backup as well.

 

[Max F]

I have two 500 GB USB external drives. One for my library and the other I plug in periodically to back up using SyncToy. If you have a windows machine SyncToy is a great little syncing tool that's free. I have it configured to do an echo of my music library - basically any changes that were made on the original drive folder are echod on the backup drive. It'll show you all the steps it will do (delete, move, add etc.) before you hit run - just in case you want to check to make sure you haven't screwed up something.

 

[Jubei]

I have a 200G external USB drive that I back up to every now and again. I also use SyncToy to do the job and also have it set to echo.

 

[_j_]

SyncToy is great software, I use that to keep my laptop updated with appropriate files form my desktop machine...

Never thought to use it for backup, how long would you say a back up of 500GB would take for the file checking, etc to take place?

 

[ozstrike]

Another user of SyncToy here. I have all my music on my main drive, and do daily backups to another drive which is only used for that.
I'm looking into either a RAID array, or to upgrade my other box to act as a server.

 

[stevenjchang]

everyone has good suggestions, but im guessing your asking because you do not have an external hard-drive.

i used itunes to back up about 75gigs of music. it can be set to backup only new aditions after the first back up. worked for me, except not perfectly with non-english titles. im sure there's other things that do this. its about 16DVDs, which is, like under 2 bucks total.

 

[Spyro]

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevenjchang /img/forum/go_quote.gif everyone has good suggestions, but im guessing your asking because you do not have an external hard-drive. i

Yes, correct. Was just wondering about different options. Thanks for the info

 

[wgr73]

Yep, same as most here...an external drive.

 

[ronin74]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Spyro /img/forum/go_quote.gif Yes, correct. Was just wondering about different options. Thanks for the info

For $100 you can get a 200g external harddrive (firewire will cost more), OR you can get 1,400g of data dvds (330 dvds)(not DL). I found that 30 cents ($0.30) per dvd is cheap insurance against harddrive failure. {i hope it did the math right

}

I do both, I'm a Murphy's Law kind-a-guy.

 

[geardoc]

rsync -av /mnt/drivewithmusic /mnt/backupdrive

 

[Manny Calavera]

Tape drive and dvd backups,that and I just started doing my dvd back ups on dual layer discs from Verbatim.Dual copies of everything here,and at my dads in a safe.