The worst thing about digital music...

mcandmar

mcandmar

New member
Backups!  I had a 2tb drive die over the weekend with my entire Music collection on it :'( 

I "think" i have a copy on another drive from about a year or so ago, really crossing my fingers i have, but everything i have discovered since then is gone.

Take this is a warning, backup your music collection folks. Just go buy an external hard drive and make a copy before its too late.

Mark.
 
Not that this is a cheap idea, but you could buy a TB drive every two years and use the new one for backup, the old one for working from.  Then two years later you get a new backup and the working drive goes into the trash.
 
Sorry to hear that Mark, its also a something I have been conscious of for sometime while I rarely purchase downloads so it not all doom and gloom here for such an event. However having to repopulate a drive from cd is a real chore and I only ever do so selectively rather than comprehensively.

I believe apple can repopulate past iTunes purchases

Are there any cloud based options for this?   
 
That DOES massively suck.. I am a little worried for the past 2 times I have fired up my Seagate HD with all my music on it. It is making some grinding noises that I am not diggin'... I hear western digital is reliable???  This is an important issue for me as well...
 
Sorry to hear you lost files. Happened to me a few years back. Call me paranoid, but since then, I keep all music files and documents redundant on a NAS 6Tb RAID 5 configured (Raid 5 takes care of single discs dying on you) plus I keep redundant copies on my local HD as well and Time Machine does hourly backups on top of that....
 
Yeah, I'll give a +1 on Raid 5.  I have a machine running a 4 drive array in Raid 5, and one drive died on me a while back.  I went to Fry's, bought a new one, swapped out the dead drive, and the raid controller put everything back in line in about 20 minutes and it was like nothing ever happened.
 
Funny you should say it, i have been using Western Digital black series drives for years as i've always had the most reliability with them.  Currently there are four WD 1tb drives in my machine setup as a raid that were one of the first 1tb drives to hit the market.  The drive that died, that was a two year old Seagate ::)

I can remember a time when Seagate where the best of them, the original IBM machines used Seagate drives way back in the dawn of time.  It was usually the cheaper brands like Maxtor and Quantum were the troublesome ones.  Quantum was eventually bought out by Maxtor, and eventually Maxtor was bought out by Seagate so these days its Seagate and Hitachi/IBM you want to avoid.  Especially the IBM Deskstar series, or Deathstar as they are known as.  But that's just my opinion..

I'm thinking about buying a NAS box that i can populate with a bunch of drives for redundancy.  I did find a backup of my music collection from 2012 on tape, its something i guess. Just need to dig through my attic to find the old Windows 2000 server that has the tape drive in it...
 
I had two 500GB internal drives in my workstation a few years ago, with a Marvell RAID setup. The RAID controller apparently glitched and it was a PITA trying to recover the data on the drives. I can't recall why now, but somehow it was not as simple as one would think. I had to install some recovery software to get the data back in one big chunk on an external backup drive and then try to sort out where everything was. Consequently I really like just putting data on external backup drives to begin with, and though it may still be too expensive for large music libraries the Cloud rocks for backups.

All that said I am guilty of needing to back up my music too.
 
I got stung with a Marvell controller years ago in an AMD machine, it all worked great until the motherboard died.  ....only then it occurred to me a RAID set with no RAID controller is &@#$ all use to anybody. Luckily a good friend had the same board in his machine so i was able to borrow it to rescue my data.
 
Seagate had a massive reputation back in the day I remember planning on making a special detour to the free enterprise zone in Penang when in transit through Maylasia the airline was including free internal flight on our tickets at the time just to pick up Seagate Barracuda drive (only 4 or 8 gig I cant remember) which was the latest high speed whiz bang drive only to find them on sale in the mall next door to the hotel I was staying at in kuala lumpur. Had a great few days rnr in Penang anyhow one of the highlights was finding a little open air  shack/kitchen just a couple of burners under a corrugated tin roof run by an old man and his son serving buddhist fair and while I like my meat the food was superb and a meal and a coke would cost just a dollar or two. After going back a few times and talking with the old boy it turned out his son who was doing the cooking used to be a chef off of the QE2 cruise liner.
 
I use a TB of google drive to sync all of my music and pictures to the cloud.  Also have a network drive in another room.  You can't have enough backups.  Google storage is pretty cheap now.
 
JamieMcC said:
Sorry to hear that Mark, its also a something I have been conscious of for sometime while I rarely purchase downloads so it not all doom and gloom here for such an event. However having to repopulate a drive from cd is a real chore and I only ever do so selectively rather than comprehensively.

I believe apple can repopulate past iTunes purchases

Are there any cloud based options for this? 
Click to expand...

HD Tracks repopulate past purchases as well, I found that out when I had a little boo boo.  :o
 
xcortes said:
The worst thing about digital was being invented.
Click to expand...

Word.
This started out like the transister did against the tube.
Sounded good (on paper) but many tweeks have been made and yet analog has not yet gone the way of the saber-tooth tiger.
Analog is still how our ears hear.  Digital to Analog converters try to make these bits of information bearable and enjoyable.
'So it goes", as Billy Pilgrim said.
 
Sorry to hear of your loss.  That is a shame and very frustrating.

I assume my drive will go down...I make that a "given" and act accordingly.  I keep my main music on my NAS (original files), I keep two backups at home and rotate with one more off site.  I back up to the two copies at home, take one of the new backups to the off site location and return with the old backup.  The next time I back up (typically monthly or as needed with adding new music), I update my oldest backup, then my newest back up and take that one to my off site location, etc.  This way I always have a current backup at home and off site and I have an older version at home, as well.  Sounds expensive? They are 2TB drives at about $100-125 each, so $350 for my system.  I bought them over a few months as they were priced right on Amazon.  Again, I assume my drive will fail as a given and the price of backups is nothing compared to replacing my music collection.

Best,
John
 
Yes, THANK YOU for this thread... I am worried about my 7 year old seagate barracuda packin' up soon... haha... and I DONT want to lose the music... SO, one of these RAID 5 gizmos I will buy pronto!... and good news that HD will repopulate purchased music that gets lost.. I guess they would really have to support their customers....But nothing is ever for sure, so good to know...So SUPER SORRY  for your loss, however, you have given us boys a kick in the pants reminder to get backed UP!! Doc included  :)
 
As with earlier posts in this thread,I can't over emphasize the value of an up to date backup and the use of fault tolerant storage.At minimum,Raid1(mirrored) preferably Raid5 .If using a NAS with a raid controller,buy drives rated for that kind of use ,not a standard desktop drive. Enterprise grade drives are your best bet ,they are made for being "hammered" day in and day out.It will cost more,probably triple what you would pay for the equivalent standard drive. Assume that at some stage you will have a NAS failure .Whilst a single drive failure can be easily recovered if you have a compatible drive to add to the array ( which in my case means keeping a stack on the shelf waiting for the inevitable ) ,If you lose a controller then the whole array is potentially lost. A desktop backup drive that is used just for backup and restoration is your second tier of defence, and a duplicate of that stored off site doesn't hurt.
I know this sounds a bit over the top,but if you have a big online music collection,it's worth a few dollars over the time and cost to recover from the loss.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Jameson
Good headless music players for MacOS/OSX?
Replies
4
Views
2K
Zimmer64
Zimmer64
O
Newly completed* Eros 2 build!
Replies
10
Views
4K
Paul Birkeland
Paul Birkeland
Aural Robert
Live Music Review: David Byrne @ The Queen E in Vancouver, BC May 23, 2018
Replies
0
Views
3K
Aural Robert
Aural Robert
Doc B
Positioning
Replies
7
Views
7K
Hank Murrow
H
R
WTFPLAY x86 Linux music player
Replies
1
Views
8K
Natural Sound
Natural Sound
Back
Top