Backing up a large music collection

In My Humble Opinion
1

I own about 1500 CDs. I ripped my entire collection to my computer years ago, and my CDs have sat in 8 large, heavy boxes in my garage ever since. We’re going to be moving in a month, so I think I’ve finally decided it’s time to bite the bullet and get rid of the CDs.

Before I do this, I want to make sure I’ve got a reliable backup of my collection. I’ve got two ideas in mind:

  1. Copy it all, as files, to DVDs. I think I could fit it all on 30 or 40 discs. I considered buying a bunch of flash drives, but my understanding is that flash drives aren’t as reliable, in the long term, as optical media.

  2. Back it up to the cloud. I’m considering paying the $10 per month for 1 TB of space on Google Drive.

I’m thinking I will do both of these, for safety’s sake. The second option is what I want to ask opinions about.

First, one thing that irritates me about Drive is the fact that it insists on a folder, aptly named “Google Drive,” where everything to be synced on my local machine must reside. I don’t like to organize my stuff that way, but I’ve been putting up with it just to back up my documents. My music resides on its own physical hard drive, and I intend to keep it that way. I’ve found this replacement client, Insync, that will allow me to backup whatever I want without moving it. Does anyone have any experience with it? Is it good?

Secondly, how reliable is Drive as a backup source? When my files are synced to the cloud, are they residing on a single hard drive somewhere else, or are there multiple copies floating around out there? What I’m getting at here is, if I have my music collection backed up on Drive, do I really need to make a DVD backup as well?

My thinking is, if my hard drive were to crash, my music would still be out there, waiting for me to download it. If a hard drive out in the cloud containing some of my music were to crash, then Drive would simply resync, copying the lost files from my computer to some other location. Therefore, the only way I would permanently lose any of my files would be if my hard drive and a cloud hard drive crashed at the same time, and the chances of that happing should be almost nil. Does that make sense? Do I have it right? Do I need to make both types of backups?

2

I loves me music… So I burned all my music files to CDs and DVDs, put everything on not one, but two external USB terabyte hard disks, and also subscribed to an off-site backup service.

(Backblaze, in my case, but Carbonite is better known. I don’t have any idea if one service is really better than another.)

Terabyte drives are available for under $100, and backup subscription services are something like $20 or $30 a year.

(The backup service has already made me happy, allowing me to recover a file I deleted.)

Actually answering your question, yes, you’re right: if your system lost data and the subscription service lost data, then you could lose the data forever. Otherwise, your system and their refresh each other any time there’s a change. They’ll also have RAID and striping and mirroring and cool stuff to prevent loss.

3

Go the cloud backup route. I’ve used one (Mozy) for several years now and have had to recover lost files from it several times (twice to recover my entire hard drive!) It worked perfectly every time. I really wouldn’t worry about a cloud service losing your data, very, *very *unlikely.

I highly DO NOT recommend backup via DVD±R discs. They are notoriously unreliable. And I don’t mean long term ‘CD rot’ or anything like that. I mean computer DVD drives will often fail to read recordable DVD data discs. Even when read by the same computer/drive that burned them it is very common for some of the data to just be unreadable on every disc. Plus their read/write speeds are agonizingly slow by today’s standards. I would go the flash drive or SD card route without even considering burning discs.

Just now doing some quick math I see that 1500 audio CDs would be over 1TB of data (I only have about 300+ CDs!). In which case I’d go with an external hard drive (make sure it’s USB 3.0). Even if your current PC doesn’t have a USB 3.0 port, buy a USB 3.0 port card for it and get a USB 3.0 drive!. After you copy everything shut it down, put it someplace safe, and don’t ever use it for anything else.

4

I make multiple identical backups of my computer to external hard drives. One is at home in a fireproof safe and another is at work. I was considering putting one in a safe deposit box. The idea is not to have all the backups in one place.

5

Take a look at plex media servers. You can set up redundant drives if you want and playback any media type from your server onto any of your WiFi devices.

6

I’m no expert, but wanted to highlight the above, which I learned the hard way. :frowning: The CD’s were long gone before I realized I had bad DVD copies.

7

I use a USB hard drive, and connect it directly to the computer when copying large amounts of data. The rest of the time, I plug it into my router which has a USB port just for this purpose, so it functions as a network drive.

8

1500 CD’s? How could you possibly enjoy all that?

I would just a make some backups of the stuff I really listened to often. I mean really most albums are 1-2 good songs and the rest are junk. I bet when you got down to it their might be 100 songs or so you really like.

9

If you’re selling the originals, keeping copies is probably not entirely legal.

My suggestion: subscribe to Spotify, Rdio, Beats music or a similar service that lets you listen to any music you like. Keep a few CDs you’re especially fond of or that can’t be found on those services, and ditch the rest. That way you can legally listen to all your old music, plus a world of new stuff.

10

You already have everything on disc. Put the discs and booklets in albums, and ditch the cases. Or put the discs on spindles, and ditch the cases and booklets.

11

I agree with this, even if all 1500 CDs were great, you can’t really listen to them all. There just isn’t time.

As for backing things up in a cloud, I wouldn’t waste your money. Buy two LaCie rugged portable drives like a 2 TB drive. Keep one in a safe deposit box and the other at home. Do backups and swap the drives from the safe deposit box once a month or however often you feel the need to do a major backup. Having only on-site backups as your only copy is not safe. You should have a safe deposit box anyway for important papers, etc., and a rugged portable drive easily fits into them if you get the right size. Cloud is not safe because someone can hack into it, and the company can have a problem and lose your data. Also, if you need to restore the data you always have a correct copy which can be done through USB directly connected to your computer which is much faster than trying download and restore 1500 CDs using broadband.

12

Apparently, you and I live on different planets. I currently have 1,928 CDs, containing over 27,500 tracks. I have them on random play, and have eliminated only a handful of them. This adds up to about 79 days of music, most of which I totally enjoy.

You’d do better, just to sit there and hum to yourself.

13

get a 2T external hard drive, about $100.

copy your computer files to external drive and burn to DVD.

you then have 3 copies at low cost.