Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Computers & Peripherals => Topic started by: gr8fl4295 on October 20, 2009, 07:29:13 pm
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Sorry not photography related, but still in the computer category.
Hello,
I've been thinking about doing a archival backup of my iTunes music and wanted to get some input from people.
I've accumulated quite a collection of music, mostly rare live concerts.
I'm afraid that the hard drive I have everything on will someday fail and crash.
It would be terrible to lose all the precious music I have collected all these years.
How are people backing up? My library is over 800gb. So cd or dvd, even dvd-dl won't cut it.
I was thinking blu-ray. But I keep reading that will be obsolete soon.
Obviously I would like something archival. Flash memory is still too small for this job.
Your thoughts??
Thanks.
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Terabyte drives seem to be your only option if you're talking 800GB of data.
Mike.
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I would look at 4 500gb 2.5" drives have two sets of the data and store one set off site.
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There is no such thing as practical "archival backup": whatever medium you use to store your data will eventually fail; Rick's answer seems the most reasonable to me (do not forget to check and replace the drives regularly).
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Convert them all to vinyl records, you only need one copy, handled carefully they will last a lifetime and will play on any turntable,
no computer needed.
If you don't want to do that then get some SCSI hard drives if you are looking for reliability, my oldest SCSI drives are now 12 years old and
I have NEVER had one fail, though several IDE drives have.
I am curious, you state your music collection is 800GB? If you rip at 320 (I'm assuming you use MP3 or similar?) your average size file would be approximately 8MB +/- for a 3.5 minute song (give or take) that would mean you have approximately 100,000 songs +/- ?
These types of collections always amaze me, why? Well, if you collected 1000 songs per year it would take 100 years to accumulate 100,000 songs.
If you listened to 4 hours of music per day and the average song was 3.5 minutes, you could "listen" to 68 different songs per day, let's call it 70
different songs per day, it would take you 1428 days of listening to hit 100,000 songs and that's if you always listened to different songs, IOW you
don't listen to the same song twice. It would take you almost 4 years to listen to your entire collection.
I have a friend who I believe has at least 100,000 records, so I do realize people collect just to collect. I do the same with cars!