A farewell to CD’s

[Vincent Kars]

I would be very interested in having your views about musical server backup.

I recently learned about a guy owning a company whose purpose is remote maintenance of music servers. For the equivalent cost of 5 full price CDs per month he will administrate your music server, including buying and loading new music and associated information.

Do you have a link?

 

[Jay_S]

I agree with the old proverb: If it's not in three places it doesn't exist.

 

[mep]

I agree with the old proverb: If it's not in three places it doesn't exist.

Wow. Digital paranoia sets in. My hard drive, my hard drive! All my ones and zeros have disappeared! Isn't this going to be a never-ending scenario because all hard drives will eventually fail? And haven't I read before that all digital data like compact discs, CDRs, etc. have a limited life span before the data becomes corrupted on them rendering all CDs that you bought worthless?

 

[Johnny Vinyl]

I would never want to lose my digital files, but if I did by some accident or malfunction it won't be the end of the world. I pretty much have hard copies of everything...yes hard copies...you know the stuff of yore! LOL!

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

I would never want to lose my digital files, but if I did by some accident or malfunction it won't be the end of the world. I pretty much have hard copies of everything...yes hard copies...you know the stuff of yore! LOL!

I have hard copies of most of it, but I still back up.

Tim

 

[Steve williams]

I would be very interested in having your views about musical server backup.

I recently learned about a guy owning a company whose purpose is remote maintenance of music servers. For the equivalent cost of 5 full price CDs per month he will administrate your music server, including buying and loading new music and associated information.

and of course you would want to know where he backs up to

 

[Jay_S]

I have had two or three drive failures over the years. But it's simply not true that all hard drives die. I have a pile of older ones that I retired because I bought bigger and faster replacements. They just accumulate. I still need to wipe the data and dispose of them.

 

[Ron Party]

I agree with the old proverb: If it's not in three places it doesn't exist.

Three places is what I've got. One at home, one at work, and finally a portable 2TB NAS drive that I take with me so I can access my entire digital collection wherever I go.

 

[mep]

I have had two or three drive failures over the years. But it's simply not true that all hard drives die. I have a pile of older ones that I retired because I bought bigger and faster replacements. They just accumulate. I still need to wipe the data and dispose of them.

Jay-I disagree. Mechanical hard drives with rotating platters and heads will all crash eventually. It's just a matter of time before it happens. If you don't believe me, please go to any computer repair shop and ask their opinion.

 

[Old Listener]

thoughts on backup

Backing up a library of music files is an easy case. Those files don't change much after they are ripped and tagged.

Different threats of data loss require different prevention mechanisms. I was concerned about theft, a house fire and to a lesser extent, human error and malware threats.

I keep two generations of backups: one is at the far end of our house from our computers. I run a new backup about once a week. The other backup generation is at a friend's house. We have lunch together about once a month and exchange backup generations. These backups give me two snapshots from the most recent 30 days (roughly.) Incremental backups are fine for this purpose and take about one minute for the music files and one minute for the rest of that dedicated music PC's files. These two generations also include backups of my general purpose PC, my wife's PC. Incremental backups for those PC usually take 30 minutes for each PC.

I also keep an simplified archive of my music files. Whenever I add new music files to my permanent library, I run the archive program and it copies new files to a USB drive. Each file is captured as it was after I added tags and imported it. Any corrections that I make later will be missing but the audio content of a music file doesn't change after I rip a CD.

I also have a copy of my permanent library on my general purpose PC. I play with beta versions of the player software on this machine. That library would be a decent starting point for recovery if I needed it.

I use the robocopy command line program that is part of Windows 7 and was available in a resource kit for XP. I have command line switches for different backup and restore scenarios.

There are many backup/restore programs for Windows; take your choice.

One other thing: Until you have gone through the recovery process, you really don't know whether it will work.

Bill

 

[JackD201]

...................and finally a portable 2TB NAS drive that I take with me so I can access my entire digital collection wherever I go.

Now that's a TRUE music junkie!!!!!

 

[FrantzM]

Hi

I started ripping all my CDs to Hard Drive. I had a RAID NAS.. Being in the Communications /IT industry I know the value of back-up so my music is backed-up in 2 other places. My office being one of them ... And I am glad I did recently suffered the lost of more than CDs and the only thing I could retrieve was a NAS with most of the CDs I ripped up to last year ... Duplicated that NAS .. and retrieved close to 79% of my CD collection .. the LP were all gone as well as most of the original CDs ...

At the current price of HDD ( 1 TB for less than U$60) and the availability of portable RAID NAS for around U$150... Backing-up one music library requires little thought or knowledge ... There are even free software for backing up one library .. It may take a while but is well worth it and ifa file or more are corrupted, you take out the original CD and rip it to another HDD or another RAID array ...

CD and other Physical supports are on their way out.. There will still be people who prefer a physical support but just like those who have decided not to use a PC they are the dwindling minority ...

 

[JackD201]

For me the biggest hurdle is plain old inertia. Ripping an entire collection into a drive one by one gets me tired just thinking about it but I know the reward of convenience waiting at the other end of the tunnel. It's a good time for a new enthusiast to get in but for those with songs in the 10s of thousands on CD the transition is daunting.

 

[FrantzM]

For me the biggest hurdle is plain old inertia. Ripping an entire collection into a drive one by one gets me tired just thinking about it but I know the reward of convenience waiting at the other end of the tunnel. It's a good time for a new enthusiast to get in but for those with songs in the 10s of thousands on CD the transition is daunting.

I believe there are companies that will rip your CD for a fee... You send them the CDs in a box and they send the ripped version and the CD back to you ... I don't know how long it takes them... One that was discussed in an Audio forum was READY TO PLAY...

 

[amirm]

For me the biggest hurdle is plain old inertia. Ripping an entire collection into a drive one by one gets me tired just thinking about it but I know the reward of convenience waiting at the other end of the tunnel. It's a good time for a new enthusiast to get in but for those with songs in the 10s of thousands on CD the transition is daunting.

There is a way around that. Keep a stack of CDs you need to rip next to you. As you browse this from and do other work, keep feeding the machine a disc as it ejects it (set your ripping software to do that). I did that and ripped all of my music a few years ago. It was a tiny bit tedious but not bad at all.

You can also pay a neighborhood kid $10//hour and have them do it. You can rip 29 to 30 CDs in an hour so the cost per disc is pretty low. Otherwise, there are services as Frantz mentioned but for me, despite having a rather large library, it was just better doing it in the background.

 

[JackD201]

I'd appreciate that Frantz! Thanks!

 

[amirm]

I have not used these guys but they are highly recommended from people who have as far as ripping service: https://www.terra-san.com/index.php

Their home page tells a nice story.

 

[Jay_S]

Jay-I disagree. Mechanical hard drives with rotating platters and heads will all crash eventually. It's just a matter of time before it happens. If you don't believe me, please go to any computer repair shop and ask their opinion.

Nope, they don't all crash in the real world. People generally use hard drives for a only few years. I have a box of 15GB - 100 GB drives that worked great for a long time and are now retired. I'll never use them again and they will never crash. Sure, everything mechanical will fail if used long enough. There's no point in arguing about that. And some drives crash after very little use. As a practical matter though, a reasonable percentage of hard drives, perhaps most, will work fine until they become obsolete.

 

[Johnny Vinyl]

There is a way around that. Keep a stack of CDs you need to rip next to you. As you browse this from and do other work, keep feeding the machine a disc as it ejects it (set your ripping software to do that). I did that and ripped all of my music a few years ago. It was a tiny bit tedious but not bad at all.

That's exactly how I did it, and it's done before you know it. Now I just feed it a new CD whenever I get one and voila...done! My PC is set to do an automatic backup once a week, and I also update a third drive monthly with all of my flies (docs/pics/music).

 

[Jay_S]

There is a way around that. Keep a stack of CDs you need to rip next to you. As you browse this from and do other work, keep feeding the machine a disc as it ejects it (set your ripping software to do that). I did that and ripped all of my music a few years ago. It was a tiny bit tedious but not bad at all.

Tedious but it's also fun to explore your collection again. I ripped a large pile of CDs a few years ago for my Ipod as I didn't have a server. I had two DVD/CD drives on my computer so that made things go much faster. But here's the conundrum: I ripped the music as 320 kbps mp3s. All of my subsequent rips are Apple Lossless (ALAC) and I am thinking about doing the earlier group again in ALAC. More tedium! The 320 kbps rips actually sound pretty good so there is no rush but ultimately I will have to redo the earlier group. Lesson learned.