The Wadster’s anguished post makes me want to review my backup arrangements. I back everything up on a scheduled basis off the two desktops (PC in the office, Mac in the music room) onto dedicated external hard drives using Syncbak and Time Machine respectively. I periodically write all the photos and videos to DVD and store at my Mum’s. I have bits and pieces on Dropbox and Amazon cloud.
However I can’t help thinking I ought to take more advantage of the Cloud. For the Mac I guess it’s easier to use Apple’s Cloud storage as whenever you try to work differently to the way Apple want you to it is a nightmare, so I am subservient to the decisions they have made. Also it’s probably easier. For the PC I could use OneDrive (which I find a bit flaky), Dropbox or Amazon Cloud….or not bother.
Any thoughts?
Well, I wouldn’t be without my NAS drive but up to now I’ve only had standard drives in it and I’ve had two fail now in about 6 years with this nas box. I keep it in a cupboard so the temperature may be to high but I’m starting to think that using the Google cloud may actually be cheaper!
After a scare a few years ago I have a 4TB WD cloud drive which is my main disk. Plugged into that is another disk which is my backup. Then I have a disk which use at work which I backup as well. And I also use Amazon Music for my music backup (£21.99 a year) and also use Google Play Music as yet another backup.
Amazon and Google are pretty simple to use, the only problems are usually with playlist and album art. And it takes ages when first uploading your library, about 2-3 days when I first did mine. I would recommend it.
I like the idea of cloud storage and it does appear to be the solution for a “protected” backup. The problem is that the Internet bandwidth to make it work properly is simply not there.
I have a Amazon unlimited storage account for USD60 a year which on the face of it is great value. The problem is that it takes ages to upload anything to it. I remember working out that it would take about a year to upload my iTunes library (and I have fibre optic fast internet connection).
So at the end of the day, the best solution in my mind is a RAID NAS (or DAS) storage unit which protects my data and then the cloud for added protection of really important data.
There’s then the questions on security with all these cloud storage providers – they may look great now, but what happens when they start increasing prices to access your data………
Great points Chris. On the bandwidth i rely don’t know – some of the services like Gobbler which constantly graze your data seem interesting though i find their website confusing now. Anyway they’re more of a recording thing. Presumably if prices go up you just go somewhere else. ..
apart from Time Machine and SuperDuper for local backup and i use Amazon AWS storage accessed via Arq for cloud.
https://www.arqbackup.com
pretty cheap if you use the Glacier minimal access option.
I use Backblaze. They’re truly great.
https://www.backblaze.com
You just can’t have enough back ups.
As well as multiple copies on various internal and external drives in the house, I’ve used Carbonite for several years now to back up everything I have except movie files (just because of the size and because they didn’t allow it when I started although they do now). Its very similar to backblaze except for the fact that they don’t offer the option of a hard drive being sent to you in the event you lose everything locally. Logically that would be almost impossible in my case, but it’s still a neat idea. Carbonite is about £42 a year – the fall in the pound has pushed the price up recently, but to me its money well spent. It runs constantly in the background and automatically backs everything up without you ever having to think about it and no, I’ve never even had hint of it slowing my PC down in anyway.
One thing I think gets overlooked in all this backing up stuff is that you need to be careful not to have just services that sync rather than keep incremental copies. If your library gets corrupted in some way a service that just syncs may well sync the problems as well so you need something that gives you access to older copies as well. Not all services do this, as I found to my cost at work when some files were encrypted locally and those copies were just synced as is, rendering the so-called backups encrypted as well.
Oh and use Google Play or Amazon as well, as a final level of defence.
Great point on successive generations – grandfather /father /son add it used to be called. Do they make that easy? Their website looks good. OK on Mac and PC?
Out here in the sticks, with an upload speed of less than 0.7mbps and an itunes library of over 100,000 songs cloud storage is a non-starter. I use a Buffalo TeraStation NAS drive with 8TB storage spread over 4 discs, this is backed up onto a WD My Book Pro 8TB external drive and everything I download I burn to CD-R asap.
A few years ago a PC crash led to me losing about 3 years worth of photos, I tried everything to retrieve them to no avail, it was one of the reasons I crossed over to the dark side now I’m everything Mac.
I’m a Windows 10 user and keep all my music files on an external USB 3TB drive. This is sync’ed once a week with 2 more identical 3TB USB drives, using a cunning little free-to-download Microsoft program called SyncToy https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=15155. It runs automatically overnight every Monday.
My laptop hard drive (which is where my Media Monkey library database and stuff is) gets backed up separately to a disc image on yet another external drive. Every so often I save a copy of the MM database file to a USB stick and I always keep the two previous copies in case of mishaps. I’ve lost my MM database twice in the past and don’t intend losing it again.
I’m currently adding a load of old bit-torrent -ed music files (from when I got a bit too enthusiastic in my collecting of “unofficial” stuff, about 8 years ago) into my library from an old 500GB drive that’s been gathering dust for the past few years. Surprisingly, the old drive seems to be performing really well.
The tagging is the time-consuming part of the operation. I’ve completed the A-D folders over the last month. Might get the job finished by Xmas if I pull my finger out.
There is no such thing as the cloud, only other people’s computers. It’s therefore not something you should ever rely on 100% for backups.
I use Dropbox on a day to day basis, having it installed on two computers means you automatically get an extra local copy as it syncs with the cloud copy each time you boot. However, I also make a weekly backup to an external hard drive for extra safety.
I was wondering – as my external hd seems to have vanished, and I have just sold nearly all my CDs – – what cloud based alternatives were out there to back up my music? Reading this thread and elsewhere on the web didn’t offer up any obvious solutions – then it occurred to me. Why bother? I would imagine 90% or more of my library is available on Spotify. Why not just back the rest up on flash drives?
What am I missing?
One thing is that, although even ripping your cds in the first place is strictly illegal, copying them and then selling the originals can never be condoned.
I shall just have to try to live with my shame.
I read a book once. It was a poetry book. I sold it but can still remember some of the poems, which I can quote verbatim. I even taught one of them to my son and he can now declaim it. Should I be expecting a solicitors letter?
Only if you wrote them down.