How many backup layers to secure my hard-drive music files?
August 26, 2016 11:17 AM Subscribe
I have a newish iMac and three external hard drives of varying age and corresponding capacity (500 GB, 2 TB, 4 TB). I have ca. 2 TB of music divided between the latter two. What is the best way of backing this up?
I use Time Machine (on the 4 TB) for the iMac itself, but my greater concern is that, if one of the drives goes, I lose much of my music. That said, I feel that buying a backup drive for the drives might lead to a "hard drives all the way down" situation, with backups to the backups of the backups.
Is multiple redundant devices, in fact, the best, most (reasonably) secure way of backing up files, or is there another way? Thanks in advance.
I use Time Machine (on the 4 TB) for the iMac itself, but my greater concern is that, if one of the drives goes, I lose much of my music. That said, I feel that buying a backup drive for the drives might lead to a "hard drives all the way down" situation, with backups to the backups of the backups.
Is multiple redundant devices, in fact, the best, most (reasonably) secure way of backing up files, or is there another way? Thanks in advance.
I second that your most important issue is getting an off-site backup working.
I use a combination of Cloudberry Labs backup software and Amazon Glacier long-term storage. Cloudberry can also be used to do regular on-site backups as well.
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 11:54 AM on August 26, 2016
I use a combination of Cloudberry Labs backup software and Amazon Glacier long-term storage. Cloudberry can also be used to do regular on-site backups as well.
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 11:54 AM on August 26, 2016
I would toss the 500 and 2tb drives, and buy a couple of 5gb (or so) external USB drives. Connect the 4Tb drive permanently to your iMac and use it for music storage and whatever you don't need to be on internal SSD (so all your music can be on here). Use the two 5tb drives as time machine backups of your entire system, alternating between them and keeping one off site enough to cover fire risk.
posted by tillsbury at 11:56 AM on August 26, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by tillsbury at 11:56 AM on August 26, 2016 [1 favorite]
You want two external hard drives plus offsite backup. It's going to take forever to upload 2TB, so you might consider a service that allows you to seed your backup with a hard drive full of data.
Without starting an audio format holy war, if you're storing your audio in FLAC, as opposed to just having a huge number of files, you might be able to switch to a "lossy" format and cut your file size down by 2/3 without a perceptible difference in audio quality.
posted by cnc at 12:16 PM on August 26, 2016
Without starting an audio format holy war, if you're storing your audio in FLAC, as opposed to just having a huge number of files, you might be able to switch to a "lossy" format and cut your file size down by 2/3 without a perceptible difference in audio quality.
posted by cnc at 12:16 PM on August 26, 2016
How often are you adding to or changing this collection? If the answer is not that often, I'd put the music on the 2GB and overflow on the 500MB and put them in storage. Use the 4GB as your external and, from time to time, copy the new files from the music folder(s) to the 500MB.
If you are really concerned about fire, flood or theft, then put the 200GB and 500MB in another location. As it is, most of these files can be reacquired if you lost both copies, so you may just want to put the drives in storage at your own home. I would hate to lose my music and ebook collections, but I can replace them all with time or money, so I don't back them up in the cloud. I couldn't recreate my digital pictures if I lost them, though and so I have them backed up to two different hard drives and two different cloud accounts.
posted by soelo at 12:26 PM on August 26, 2016
If you are really concerned about fire, flood or theft, then put the 200GB and 500MB in another location. As it is, most of these files can be reacquired if you lost both copies, so you may just want to put the drives in storage at your own home. I would hate to lose my music and ebook collections, but I can replace them all with time or money, so I don't back them up in the cloud. I couldn't recreate my digital pictures if I lost them, though and so I have them backed up to two different hard drives and two different cloud accounts.
posted by soelo at 12:26 PM on August 26, 2016
Ignore the weird sizes in my answer and just look at the numbers =)
posted by soelo at 1:07 PM on August 26, 2016
posted by soelo at 1:07 PM on August 26, 2016
Response by poster: Thanks to all. This is very helpful. I'd wondered about offsite backup and will look into the recommended services. I add to my music holdings (which are in FLAC, ALAC and mp3 formats) regularly, so something too static wouldn't work as well.
posted by the sobsister at 2:03 PM on August 26, 2016
posted by the sobsister at 2:03 PM on August 26, 2016
This thread is closed to new comments.
But, honestly, the thing that I think you really need no matter what you do is an off-site backup. There are a number of good services out there, but I just paid up my Crashplan subscription for the 4th straight year and I've been nothing but happy with them. For me, they were the most cost-effective for backing up multiple computers in our house, but I think others are cheaper if you only have one computer.
posted by Betelgeuse at 11:35 AM on August 26, 2016