Article: Music Storage, New Music, Remote Access, and a Cool Streamer Project

[The Computer Audiophile]

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[NOMBEDES]

first thing I would do is take the radio apart and refinish the wood.  I bet it would look very nice.

[joelha]

Chris,

 

Try Backblaze's personal use option.

 

Unlimited storage for about the same price as Amazon's old plan

 

All the best.

 

Joel

[mrvco]

For off-site backup I use Crashplan (including my digital music library).  The Family Plan is $149.99 / year w/ unlimited storage for up to ten machines.  There is also a single machine plan for $59.99 / year.

[unbalanced output]

@The Computer Audiophile it was quite obvious that the prices would hike up at some point. Have a look at Microsoft, they have plans to get big on this business. 

 

Coincidentally, just this week I was looking at offline backups. The big advantage of cold (offline) backup is that, as long as the medium is kept in good state, there is zero risk associated with hacker attacks, companies going out of business, law risks (think of Megaupload users) and so on. Disadvantages are, you can't lose your tapes/disks and not really ideal for constantly changing data (not a big problem for a music collection IMO). Cold backup is still the way to go for sensitive data (and cloud services as well). 

 

The best technology for I belive would still be LTO (good ol' tape). The initial investment is quite hefty (1200 and up for the recorder), however the cost per Terabyte is very low (20 bucks per Tb). RDX technology (HDD based) has very low initial investment, however the price per Tb is much higher (~150 / Tb). Expensive if compared to a $60 unlimited cloud storage service, but cheap compared to one 15x its price (you're in the green on the second year already). 

 

Just an idea. For the moment I'm using neither cloud nor tapes as backup. 

 

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

44 minutes ago, joelha said:

Chris,

 

Try Backblaze's personal use option.

 

Unlimited storage for about the same price as Amazon's old plan

 

All the best.

 

Joel

 

Hi Joel - Backblaze personal only allows backing up data that's on a computer. All my content is on a NAS. Backblaze appears to require a Backblaze B2 account for this.

[The Computer Audiophile]

42 minutes ago, mrvco said:

For off-site backup I use Crashplan (including my digital music library).  The Family Plan is $149.99 / year w/ unlimited storage for up to ten machines.  There is also a single machine plan for $59.99 / year.

 

Trying to figure out Crashplan. It appears that a computer with a mapped drive is required to backup a NAS. The site is confusing with Crashplan and Code42 and different but similar options between then etc...

[joelha]

I've also been using Crashplan and after about 4TB's, the upload speed decreased considerably. Maybe the issue is on my end but my uploads to Backblaze are considerably faster with over 14TB's uploaded and counting.

 

Joel

[The Computer Audiophile]

25 minutes ago, joelha said:

I've also been using Crashplan and after about 4TB's, the upload speed decreased considerably. Maybe the issue is on my end but my uploads to Backblaze are considerably faster with over 14TB's uploaded and counting.

 

Joel

Do you have a computer connected to the 14TB, that runs the Backblaze app?

[ShawnC]

I love those old radio station dials.  If you're from the Twin Cities and older than 40, you'll recognize those stations immediately.  Where'd you get that?

[DaQi]

Is this maybe an opportunity for a cooperative private solution on storage. What I am thinking about is something along the lines of a torrent type peer network that users contribute storage to and can then use that amount of storage in the shared private cloud. So, for example let's say I have a 2TB library that I want to back up. I make 2TB of space available to the private cloud and in exchange I get to use 2TB of space in the cloud. In order to have some redundancy maybe I need to make 4TB available. Would need some sort of software to manage this (not sure if something like this already exists or not). My backup is redundantly spread in the cloud and in exchange I make some space available to that cloud. So for the cost of the space that I make available I get an equal amount of space in the private cloud for backup. This is sort of like the idea of sending a hard drive to a friend except taking it a bit further. 

 

Just a thought for a interesting CA project. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

I would love such a solution! Brilliant!

 

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 hour ago, ShawnC said:

I love those old radio station dials.  If you're from the Twin Cities and older than 40, you'll recognize those stations immediately.  Where'd you get that?

 

Found it in my basement. Could have been here when we moved in 10 years ago. 

 

Oh yes, I know the stations. 

[foodfiend]

@DaQi

Wonderful idea, but difficult to administer. Who will ensure that each person is really putting more storage into the "system" than is actually using? This is especially so with a distributed system.

 

Would love to join if there is such a project. A global community like this would be swell!

[foodfiend]

4 hours ago, joelha said:

I've also been using Crashplan and after about 4TB's, the upload speed decreased considerably. Maybe the issue is on my end but my uploads to Backblaze are considerably faster with over 14TB's uploaded and counting.

 

Joel

I had exactly the same issue with Crashplan. After a year of trying to back up about 6 TB of music, I gave up. I believe they throttle once you go beyond the usual internal PC storage.

[number8]

@The Computer Audiophile

1/ Synology is about to market its cloud solution named Synology C2 at 0,005/GB/y usd

2/ buy a second NAS and replicate the main one. If possible set it up offsite. Toshiba N300 8TB is priced 280 usd. Put two of them in a new unit you don't even need to power up the backup NAS 24/7.

[jventer]

7 hours ago, DaQi said:

Is this maybe an opportunity for a cooperative private solution on storage. What I am thinking about is something along the lines of a torrent type peer network that users contribute storage to and can then use that amount of storage in the shared private cloud. So, for example let's say I have a 2TB library that I want to back up. I make 2TB of space available to the private cloud and in exchange I get to use 2TB of space in the cloud. In order to have some redundancy maybe I need to make 4TB available. Would need some sort of software to manage this (not sure if something like this already exists or not). My backup is redundantly spread in the cloud and in exchange I make some space available to that cloud. So for the cost of the space that I make available I get an equal amount of space in the private cloud for backup. This is sort of like the idea of sending a hard drive to a friend except taking it a bit further. 

 

Just a thought for a interesting CA project. 

 

6 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I would love such a solution! Brilliant!

 

 

Have a look at STORJ

 

Maybe we should also approach the existing bittorrent providers

 

[joelha]

12 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Do you have a computer connected to the 14TB, that runs the Backblaze app?

I do, Chris.

 

Joel

[Kemorr]

For unlimited backup at a reasonable price - Carbonite

[silverarrows]

It's not the same type of backup you're looking for, but what about Vox Loop to have another backup of your music? Also, another idea is to set up another NAS as a duplicate of yours and keep it at someone else's place. You can use Resilio Sync afterward to keep everything synced.

[Cornan]

What about something like this for the Cool Streamer Project? 

 

 

Available here http://www.audiophonics.fr/en/cases-for-raspberry-pi-and-other-sbc/smartipi-touch-for-raspberry-pi-3-pi2-a-b-and-official-pi-display-lcd-7-p-11870.html

 

 

[Cornan]

Here is also a "similar" project with pictures using an old portable radio http://imgur.com/a/mVLxp

[The Computer Audiophile]

7 hours ago, number8 said:

@The Computer Audiophile

1/ Synology is about to market its cloud solution named Synology C2 at 0,005/GB/y usd

2/ buy a second NAS and replicate the main one. If possible set it up offsite. Toshiba N300 8TB is priced 280 usd. Put two of them in a new unit you don't even need to power up the backup NAS 24/7.

 

I researched C2 and it looks like it will be the same price as Backblaze $0.005 per GB per month

 

 

 

 

5 hours ago, jventer said:

 

Have a look at STORJ

 

Maybe we should also approach the existing bittorrent providers

 

 

 

STORJ looks cool, but also about $225 per month for my 15TB.

 

Would love to work with the Bit Torrent guys.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, silverarrows said:

It's not the same type of backup you're looking for, but what about Vox Loop to have another backup of your music? Also, another idea is to set up another NAS as a duplicate of yours and keep it at someone else's place. You can use Resilio Sync afterward to keep everything synced.

 

Ran across Resilio Sync last night. I will check it our again.

[unbalanced output]

Lol my suggestion has been totally ignored. 

 

Rumored price for Synology C2 in EU is 60 euros / (Tb*year), same price of other services 0.005 / (Gb * month). Similar numbers for US?

 

For 15 Tb that's 900 euros per year, still not exactly a bargain. 

 

 

[sdolezalek]

If you think about it, the storage business model is really backwards.  If all of us at CA stored duplicates of our entire music libraries in the cloud, think about how much waste and duplication there would be in terms of storage.  What we really need is a service that verifies what we each have, stores one copy of that on a safe server and then allows any subscriber to "restore" their collection as needed, based upon files previously verified as "owned.'  Who knows, my entire library might be just a tiny subset of Chris' or others here.  

 

Is there any way CA could start something like that as a subscription service?  My guess is that folks like Amazon, google, etc. wouldn't love it because they now all want to start charging us more for storage now that they have us on the hook.