Just a friendly reminder on the importance of backups

[Musicophile]

My worst case scenario happened: the main external music hard drive crashed.

 

I'm so happy I had my full backup strategy in place.

 

This is just a friendly reminder to all of you that this can happen any day!

 

Here's my little story:

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f7-disk-storage-music-library-storage/external-firewire-drive-crashed-suggestions-replacement-18954/

[alexwgoody]

That's awful. I've had smaller hard drive failures that have taken out files (all of them replaceable though) and I feel your pain. My next step is to buy cloud space on Amazon Glacier and have a backup there as well as the physical one in my apartment. It is very cheap, however they charge a large amount if you need to get your data all at once.

 

AWS | Amazon Glacier – Cloud Archive & Backup Storage

 

Has anyone used this or have a similar solution?

[Paul R]

A few portable hard drives in the bottom of my desk at work? Or in a safe deposit box? Whatever reasonably meets your requirements for an offsite backup. If possible, make sure the drives are bootable too. I love EFI BIOS systems that way.

 

-Paul

 

 

That's awful. I've had smaller hard drive failures that have taken out files (all of them replaceable though) and I feel your pain. My next step is to buy cloud space on Amazon Glacier and have a backup there as well as the physical one in my apartment. It is very cheap, however they charge a large amount if you need to get your data all at once.

 

AWS | Amazon Glacier – Cloud Archive & Backup Storage

 

Has anyone used this or have a similar solution?

[Musicophile]

That's awful. I've had smaller hard drive failures that have taken out files (all of them replaceable though) and I feel your pain. My next step is to buy cloud space on Amazon Glacier and have a backup there as well as the physical one in my apartment. It is very cheap, however they charge a large amount if you need to get your data all at once.

 

AWS | Amazon Glacier – Cloud Archive & Backup Storage

 

Has anyone used this or have a similar solution?

Well, given my dual backup it wasn't too much of a pain. I was just a bit pissed off because it happened on a Saturday morning and I keep my CCC backup at work, so had an entire weekend without access to most of my music.

 

In this concext I enjoyed even more the fact that sites like Qobuz let you download stuff you've purchased again without any hassle, so at least I wasn't completely "dry" :-)

 

I'm just thinking what a nightmare this would have been without the backup.

 

With regards to cloud storage, the limiting factor today is still upload and download speed, so for my library size not really acceptable, and it is not really cheap either. For the price of one year of storage at most of the sites you get one full backup drive, which you can store wherever you want offsite (office, family, neighbor, etc.).

[Allan F]

Well, given my dual backup it wasn't too much of a pain...I'm just thinking what a nightmare this would have been without the backup.

 

Sorry to hear about your hard drive crash, but glad to see you were backed up and able to restore your music library. Thanks for the reminder. I am backing up my NAS right now.

[wgscott]

My approach to this is to have two identical backup drives. One is attached to my airport extreme, and the other is at work. About once a month I swap them, so if the house burns down, I won't lose a lot. For my most personal correspondence and bank records, I let the NSA handle it, since I already paid for it in taxes.

[shadowlight]

How often do you guys sync up the backup drive which is offsite?

[Musicophile]

How often do you guys sync up the backup drive which is offsite?

On average once per month but I got lucky, just did the last backup on Jan 7.

[Melvin]

Glad it all worked out for you! Imagine if you hadn't been diligent .. OY.

[Snowmonkey]

Another illustration of the value of a NAS, running in RAID 1 (mirroring) mode. It is a virtual guarantee against hard drive failure - even if one drive crashes, you can just continue on as if nothing had happened, while obtaining a replacement for the failed drive. Of course, you can run two drives in RAID 1 mode in your PC, but the NAS just makes it easier to replace/upgrade drives plus it makes your music collection available on your home network while the PC is turned off.

It's still worth having a backup drive offsite, in case of fire or the like.

[elcorso]

My approach to this is to have two identical backup drives. One is attached to my airport extreme, and the other is at work. About once a month I swap them, so if the house burns down, I won't lose a lot. For my most personal correspondence and bank records, I let the NSA handle it, since I already paid for it in taxes.

 

Very good idea, then you can ask the NSA or Snowden for a Backup if something fail...!

 

Thanks,

 

Roch

[elcorso]

My worst case scenario happened: the main external music hard drive crashed.

 

I'm so happy I had my full backup strategy in place.

 

This is just a friendly reminder to all of you that this can happen any day!

 

Here's my little story:

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f7-disk-storage-music-library-storage/external-firewire-drive-crashed-suggestions-replacement-18954/

 

Good to know that you don't lost anything...!

 

It's my nightmare, even if I have my music collection a RAID 1, now I have another backup of this.

 

Cheers!

 

Roch

[Allan F]

Another illustration of the value of a NAS, running in RAID 1 (mirroring) mode. It is a virtual guarantee against hard drive failure - even if one drive crashes, you can just continue on as if nothing had happened, while obtaining a replacement for the failed drive. Of course, you can run two drives in RAID 1 mode in your PC, but the NAS just makes it easier to replace/upgrade drives plus it makes your music collection available on your home network while the PC is turned off.

It's still worth having a backup drive offsite, in case of fire or the like.

 

A NAS running in RAID strictly speaking is not considered to be backup. It is redundancy, which as you point out, significantly reduces your risk in the event of a HDD failure. However, the NAS itself can fail, damaging both drives at the same time resulting in no backup. My NAS runs RAID with two 2TB drives, but I also back up to an external USB drive. IOW, a NAS should be backed up to some external device for reasons in addition to the one you mention.

[Audio_ELF]

Just to add to the "RAID is not backup" warning...

 

On of the major reasons for needing a backup is not hardware failure, but user error. If (for example) you accidentally replace the Album title on all of your collection with "Abba Greatest Hits" rather than on just a single CD... The raid array will happily replicate the change to the second disc.

 

Eloise

[Allan F]

Just to add to the "RAID is not backup" warning...

 

On of the major reasons for needing a backup is not hardware failure, but user error. If (for example) you accidentally replace the Album title on all of your collection with "Abba Greatest Hits" rather than on just a single CD... The raid array will happily replicate the change to the second disc.

 

Eloise

 

Excellent point, Eloise. User error is unquestionably far more frequent than hardware failure.

[coxhaus]

I lost a drive in my RAID5 server over Christmas so I am feeling your pain. I am in the process of replacing the RAID5 with a SSD for the OS and a 4 TB drive. I built this RAID over six years ago when 1 TB hard drives were over $200. I have only lost one drive before this failure but the drives are getting old. It is time to move forward. I do have backups of my server and a complete copy of my music on another workstation.

[Snowmonkey]

Just to add to the "RAID is not backup" warning...

 

On of the major reasons for needing a backup is not hardware failure, but user error. If (for example) you accidentally replace the Album title on all of your collection with "Abba Greatest Hits" rather than on just a single CD... The raid array will happily replicate the change to the second disc.

 

Eloise

Not denying the need for a backup in addition to a NAS Eloise, but please tell me - how on earth do you accidentally rename the title for every album in your collection?

[Snowmonkey]

A NAS running in RAID strictly speaking is not considered to be backup. It is redundancy, which as you point out, significantly reduces your risk in the event of a HDD failure. However, the NAS itself can fail, damaging both drives at the same time resulting in no backup. My NAS runs RAID with two 2TB drives, but I also back up to an external USB drive. IOW, a NAS should be backed up to some external device for reasons in addition to the one you mention.

Allan, as I said, I agree you need a separate backup offsite, but are you aware of any specific instances of NAS failure damaging both drives? Unless some sort of malicious software got into a NAS, I'm having trouble visualising how it would damage the drives. The biggest danger seems to be a sudden loss of power causing corruption of a file which the NAS was actively writing at the time.

[firedog]

My approach to this is to have two identical backup drives. One is attached to my airport extreme, and the other is at work. About once a month I swap them, so if the house burns down, I won't lose a lot. For my most personal correspondence and bank records, I let the NSA handle it, since I already paid for it in taxes.

 

I read somewhere about someone who wrote the NSA asking for copies of his email after he lost his Needless to say, he didn't get a positive response.

 

 

Musicophile-thanks. I do back up- often to another drive on my home network, and occasionally to an HDD that I keep in a fireproof case. But your post prompted me to renew the backups. Thanks.

[Audio_ELF]

Not denying the need for a backup in addition to a NAS Eloise, but please tell me - how on earth do you accidentally rename the title for every album in your collection?

Well using something like iTunes, you think you've selected the album you are interested in changing in the chooser list; press "Ctrl-A" to select all, then right click and Get Info then click okay to the acknowledgement that you have multiple items selected. Change metadata and then Robert is your mother's brother.

 

Only afterwards did you realise you missed step one and instead of changing metadata for one album you're changing for the whole thing.

 

What follows is a phone call to technical support (a.k.a. your sister in law)...

 

I was using it more just an example of user error which isn't that difficult to achieve and very difficult to undo without a backup.

 

Eloise

[Audio_ELF]

I read somewhere about someone who wrote the NSA asking for copies of his email after he lost his Needless to say, he didn't get a positive response.

[video=youtube_share;-qrlDGhoI1Q]

[Musicophile]

Well using something like iTunes, you think you've selected the album you are interested in changing in the chooser list; press "Ctrl-A" to select all, then right click and Get Info then click okay to the acknowledgement that you have multiple items selected. Change metadata and then Robert is your mother's brother.

 

Only afterwards did you realise you missed step one and instead of changing metadata for one album you're changing for the whole thing.

 

What follows is a phone call to technical support (a.k.a. your sister in law)...

 

I was using it more just an example of user error which isn't that difficult to achieve and very difficult to undo without a backup.

 

Eloise

Happened to me already. Luckily I noticed after only a handful of albums and was able to stop, but still reversing this was a pain.

[Boris75]

(...)

 

In this concext I enjoyed even more the fact that sites like Qobuz let you download stuff you've purchased again without any hassle, so at least I wasn't completely "dry" :-)

(...)

 

On that count eClassical and Qobuz are far superior to HDtracks and ProStudioMasters.

[Boris75]

 

On of the major reasons for needing a backup is not hardware failure, but user error. If (for example) you accidentally replace the Album title on all of your collection with "Abba Greatest Hits" rather than on just a single CD... The raid array will happily replicate the change to the second disc.

 

Nice example. You put a smile on my face

[Jsmith]

That's awful. I've had smaller hard drive failures that have taken out files (all of them replaceable though) and I feel your pain. My next step is to buy cloud space on Amazon Glacier and have a backup there as well as the physical one in my apartment. It is very cheap, however they charge a large amount if you need to get your data all at once.

 

AWS | Amazon Glacier – Cloud Archive & Backup Storage

 

Has anyone used this or have a similar solution?

 

I use CrashPlan as my cloud backup. Online Data Backup - Offsite, Onsite, & Cloud - CrashPlan Backup Software

 

What I love about it is you can run it on Linux. I have it running on my VortexBox so after I rip a CD, at night CrashPlan backs it up to the cloud. I have a backup copy right away without doing any work. Then periodically I backup all of my music to a separate external drive. Now I have a full local copy and a cloud copy.