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

[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.

[foodfiend]

Most of these cloud services are targeted at the business user, who gets an income for the use of this data. Hence, it makes little sense for an individual to pay for such services.

 

I still await the day when cloud services start looking at the back-up of home NASes as a market...

[foodfiend]

1 minute ago, sdolezalek said:

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.

Totally agree with this. I think that this is similar to what Murfie is trying to accomplish. Except that they store your CDs too. Complications start when we have different meta-data in our rips...

[foodfiend]

16 minutes ago, DaQi said:

Software development is not cheap but it is also not that expensive either. How much would you be willing to pay for such a service as a user, that is on top of the price of putting up some storage for the community pool? Would you be willing to be a founder and kick in a bit more to get it going? If we can get a bunch of people together it could be a lot less than that new piece of gear you are eyeing. 

I think most of us here have at one time signed up for the unlimited storage on Amazon Cloud, so US$60 a year is something most would at least agree with. I am quite sure that a slightly higher amount could be justified if there were more features than just a cloud back-up (which is easily done).

 

Then again, if someone like Amazon or Backblaze charge US$60/TB/year, we need quite a bit of redundancy to get down to US$60 per member per year. So, if we have a total of 100TB of data as a community, we would need to raise at least US$6000 per annum or 100 users to just cover storage costs. Not impossible, but I am sure there will be trade-offs, like metadata and file formats. For example, if we save all PCM data as FLAC, the AIFF/ALAC camp may not be too happy, and if the data is stored as AIFF, the FLAC camp would be less satisfied.

[foodfiend]

5 minutes ago, John Milton said:

 I also just started a month free of crashplan, I mainly chose this because it seems easier to restore data, which seems to come at a premium at backblaze, and the encryption.

 

so far, it seems to work fine, with very decent upload speeds. Think this will replace amazon drive and Arq for me.

Report back to us once you get to more than a few TBs of data. From experience, Crashplan then throttles the data transfer rate to an excruciatingly slow pace. I signed for a year, and never got to complete my back-up of my Mac Mini with the attached 8 TB HDD, and so I just gave up.

[foodfiend]

4 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

I wonder if you're grandfathered into the plan. I looked at it yesterday and Google wouldn't enable me to select less than 3 users for the unlimited plan.

I think google drive's policies vary from country to country. Where I am, I need to have more than 5 users to go for unlimited storage.

[foodfiend]

@agladstone

I am quite sure that we can assemble 5 or even 10 users for the access to unlimited storage. However, I do hear you about the throttling, which would surely impact the rate at which the users will be able to upload their music. This makes it hardly any better than many of the other cloud backup solutions available.

[foodfiend]

@agladstone Is it possible to write a script to upload a folder/album at a time sequentially, thereby circumventing the throttling? 20 Mbps, while not speedy, is much better than 2 Mbps.

[foodfiend]

8 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

If the safety deposit boxes had network connections, that would be really cool. 

Don't forget the power supply too...

[foodfiend]

Time to ask Crashplan if their "small business" solutions support NAS back-up directly.

[foodfiend]

I remember someone had developed a package to run Crashplan on a Synology NAS. However, I am not sure how to get it to work. Crashplan also mention that they do not support NASes - no customer support for that in the "small business" tier.

[foodfiend]

Installing Crashplan on Synology

 

Has anyone read this one?

[foodfiend]

13 hours ago, mrvco said:

Of course considering the cost and life expectancy of the hardware, Backblaze starts sounding pretty reasonable.

And Backblaze is a completely scalable solution!

[foodfiend]

21 minutes ago, Kal Rubinson said:

Is that true?  After "$10 per user per month," it says "Unlimited cloud storage (or 1TB per user if fewer than 5 users)."

Even if they actually still allow "unlimited data" in spite of the comment "or 1 TB per user if fewer than 5 users", there is still the issue of throttling. Reducing your bandwidth would make any back-up a lengthy process.

[foodfiend]

@John Milton I won't be surprised if the consumer market was never part of their core business strategy in the first place. Just that when they have built a data centre, and it is operating at a barely break-even volume, they might have seen the consumer market as an easy way to soak up excess capacity. Now that they have more corporate clients to fill the data centre, they can shed the consumers.

[foodfiend]

@The Computer Audiophile That was the kind of experience I had with Crashplan when I signed up with them (before Amazon had their unlimited plan). I was far from done after a year, even though the computer it was backing-up from, was hardly used. Naturally, I gave up.

[foodfiend]

Speaking from my personal perspective, I would just want my music data to be backed up (since it takes the most storage, and is the biggest hassle to rebuild/re-rip). I wouldn't even care about versioning, or images. I would also have no need for that data to be encrypted.

[foodfiend]

41 minutes ago, agladstone said:

Agreed!! 

So I guess I need to buy the 1817+ and you and I can be the first "CA Buddy team" as a trial  

Would love to do so, but you would have to deal with intercontinental Internet transfer rates (not ideal, but I am in Asia). Am game to set up a test, so that we can get an idea of the speed of uploads and downloads, before committing to buying extra HDDs.

[foodfiend]

@The Computer Audiophile I am still very much interested in the archiving of a single set of lossless music files, which all of us have partial access to (depending on our ownership of music) for the sole purpose of remote back-up. It would really be cool if that service could then populate a new HDD and send it to the member (at additional charge to cover costs of the HDD and transport), should that member's primary back-up fails.

 

I still think that it would be a worthwhile project to explore, although there may be some teething issues with metadata and file formats. However, I definitely would still prefer transcoding a bunch of music files, to re-ripping the said files from CD (this would be needed if they are in different file format - FLAC->AIFF, for example).

 

Am I the only one? Or can we really get something like this going? If we are serious, then we should really try to get a show of hands as to how many are willing to jump on to share the costs of setting this up.

[foodfiend]

6 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I have 1 Gbps upload / download with no data cap or any restrictions :~)

I also have 1 Gbps, but I only see such crazy speeds for local traffic. That was why I signed with Amazon Cloud, because they operate a data centre in country.

[foodfiend]

2 minutes ago, agladstone said:

Maybe we could sign up for an unlimited data corporate enterprise server account and then all split the monthly costs? That would also allow for personal folders for each member of the group with password protection, etc so not to worry about your very good idea, which would be much more difficult to manage and implement?? 

Part of the rationale is to cut the storage requirements (and associated costs) by cutting out all the duplicated data.

[foodfiend]

4 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

My bandwidth speed tests consistently show ~925 Mbps up and down. I can usually transport data as fast as the other allows. 

Good for you. I just did a random speed test with a server in LA, my down speed is 10% of my local down speed, and my up speed is about 3% of local up speed. Pathetic!

[foodfiend]

21 minutes ago, agladstone said:

I understand! Basically you're suggesting an audiophile version of what itunes Launched years ago, except minus the 320mps downgrade of all your music  

its a great idea, but how to Manage such a task? 

Roon could do this! But how could we?? 

I am not proposing that the two of us do it. It is something of a business project, depending on what potential uptake will be like.

[foodfiend]

@ednaz, @The Computer Audiophile Perhaps we can try to ask these companies what is the size of their data pipe, although I doubt they would be forthcoming with the data. Having many clients share a single pipe would result in a marked slowdown in transfer speeds, without resorting to throttling. This would still be frustrating for us with lots of data to back-up.