[Sparky191]

For a valid back up you need previous versions of data preferably stored away from the machine being backed up. So you can restore if you delete something by accident, edit something by accident. You can go back to an earlier version. You also have to consider if there was a fire, or the machine and attached disks got stolen. If its sensitive data consider encypting it. That said I generally synch between a couple of USB disks, one every few days, another every few weeks and another every few months. Critical stuff goes out to a dated DVDs every few months. Thats all my data. For music you've always got the original CD in most cases. I prefer Karen's Replicator to SyncToy myself.

 

[fatcat28037]

External Hard Drive.

 

[Lou Erickson]

My music collection is stored on a file server's drives. They're redundant with RAID5.

The music on the file server is backed up monthly, to tape. Other portions are backed up more often, but the music doesn't change much and is large. (I use star, if any of you other geeks were curious. gnu tar didn't handle the volume changes right.)

It's also stored on my DAP's hard drive. I've broken or lost a couple of those, though, and consider it a secondary backup to the tape.

I also have all the original media to digitize again if I need to.

The external hard drives are a great solution, and one of my other machines (with smaller disks) backs up that way. This one would if I built a 500G server today, but it's five years old, and runs a big stack of 120G drives.

 

[The Monkey]

Can someone recommend a good, relatively inexpensive external drive for an iMac?

 

[cooperpwc]

Rockbox backs up my MP3s - one copy on my computer - one on my iPod (shifting to iRiver). FLAC image files are burned to DVD. (Some people are saying thay they have the original CDs as back up. So do I but ripping in EAC is not something I want to do again from scratch.)