How do YOU backup your music?

[autopilot]

I currently have 2 HDD's in my PC. I have 2 large important folder trees, one with my music and on with my photo's. Currently i am manually copying everything between drives, but this is becoming a bit of a chore and often i forget.

So what software people here use and would recommend for me?

I don't want anything fancy, i.e. compression is needed as obviously its already compressed. Just a simple solution with folder syncing and preset times (over night).

Oh, and free would be nice too

[Steven Moore]

As I scan a cd into itunes I keep a copy of it in a folder, when the folder reaches 4.4gb I burn it to dvd.

[fuzzyT]

dangerous_dom wrote:
> So what software people here use and would recommend for me?

What OS are you running?

For Linux, look into rsync.

For Windows look into robocopy.

Either can be scripted and scripts scheduled.

--rt

[jonheal]

I've got my music on a drive connected to a Linksys NSLU2. Once a week, the NSLU2 copied the entire drive to the other identical drive that is connected to it.

[kjg]

Folks had been touting a tool from Microsoft called SyncToy which I
tried, but for me was very unreliable. I found a simple, free program on
the net called ICE Mirror that does the trick for me. Just point it to a
source and destination directory on any drive and it'll take care of
mirroring the files exactly. You have to start it up manually, but it
takes care of all of the sync'ing chores for you, including removing
files on the destination that have been renamed on the source, etc. You
can also run more than one instance if you want to sync multiple
directories simultaneously. Nice tool for a freebie.

http://www.ice-graphics.com/ICEMirror/IndexE.html

dangerous_dom wrote:
> I currently have 2 HDD's in my PC. I have 2 large important folder
> trees, one with my music and on with my photo's. Currently i am
> manually copying everything between drives, but this is becoming a bit
> of a chore and often i forget.
>
> So what software people here use and would recommend for me?
>
> I don't want anything fancy, i.e. compression is needed as obviously
> its already compressed. Just a simple solution with folder syncing and
> preset times (over night).
>
> Oh, and free would be nice too
>
>
>

[autopilot]

Sorry, running XP. Don't need CD/DVD buring either.

[bklaas]

All new music goes into a folder called new_additions. Periodically I burn this to CD or DVD, at which point I parse the new_additions content to appropriate folders.

I also have a 2HD system that I backup daily from one to the other. I use rsnapshot (http://rsnapshot.org), which is a great backup utility built on rsync for *nix operating systems. Given you didn't mention your OS, I'm assuming you are on Windows, so this won't be available to you.

cheers,
#!/ben

[twylie]

I, too got tired of backing up to external drives and wasn't happy about having to keep burning plastic. It wasn't the music so much as a video archiving project that drove me over the edge - 12GB per hour of video in raw format. About 3 years ago, I sucked it up and built a dedicated server with hardware RAID. It has been running 6 * 250GB drives in RAID5 with hotspare for 1TB of storage. A year later, I built a second server with 1.75TB in RAID5 using 8 * 250GB drives. Both servers have been runnign 24x7 in my basement since they were built. I use RDP to control and admin each of them. Although this gave me some improvement over losing a single hard drive, all my digital financial records, pictures, and source videos were loaded on a 300GB USB drive I sent to my parents house in another state. I update that drive about once a quarter with them.

[jmpage2]

All of my music and other data is backed up from a server with mirrored hard disks to an external hard drive in another part of the house.

I run M$FT robocopy utility to synch the data nightly.

If I was really anal retentive I would buy a 2nd external enclosure and keep a rotated backup in my fire safe or periodically send it to Aunt Glenda in the Ozarks for safe keeping.

[mherger]

> I also have a 2HD system that I backup daily from one to the other. I
> use rsnapshot (http://rsnapshot.org), which is a great backup utility
> built on rsync for *nix operating systems. Given you didn't mention
> your OS, I'm assuming you are on Windows, so this won't be available to
> you.

Add my vote for rsnapshot - I even use it to backup Windows machines to my
Linux server (with cwRsync on the Windows side). Not as effective as with
Linux only systems, but still great to have a history of your files
available.

--

Michael

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