Article: How To Backup Aurender Music Servers

[SirAtilla]

Thanks for sharing.  I like you have almost two decades into a digital library curation starting back with ripped FLACs on an Escient music server that I am sure most have never heard of at this point.  At end of day having a solid backup is most important and this is a reasonable approach.  

 

My approach is a little different from a philosophy standpoint.  I view my library spread across two Aurenders as a copy not the source of truth.  There are many reasons for this but largely because I do some much editing on computer and often on massive scale with scripts and automation if I want to make some major change to improve the metadata.  I would never want to do these operations on the Aurender itself.  When I am happy, I copy the resultant delta changes over.  This means that my Aurender may change infrequently depending on music acquisition often just a few times in a month.  The other reason I do this as I don't want to do any unnecessary operations on the Aurender including backup of the music files from it since I have them stored elsewhere.  I do archive every 3 months the stars and playlists library from the Aurender which is very small.

 

I have an external drive representing the on-disk layout I use on the Aurenders connected to my iMac.  This gets backed up on a normal time machine schedule (hourly, weekly, monthly etc.) to a Synology DS918+ with 4 IronWolf 8TB drives and two 512GB SSD NVme cache modules.  This leaves me with a copy direct connected to iMac, versioned backups on an hourly basis, and flexibility to utilize more sophisticated techniques like file system snapshots before a bulk operation for an easy and quick restore.  It's also nice that if mess something up can easily go back just a few hours and grab a file without ever touching Aurender.

 

Lastly the solution described meets the case for backups but not does not address Disaster Recovery (DR).  I actually think I could reconstruct my personal life quicker than my music library at this point with so many things like contacts, photos, etc. already on cloud.  Accordingly, I backup my music library and other important data not already in cloud weekly to AWS Deep Glacier.  1TB is about $1 a month and Google Cloud and others like Wasabi have similar pricing tiers.  I use a program called ArqBackup mainly because it encrypts the data before transferring it to the cloud with your own local persisted keys.  In the incredibly unfortunate event that the house was destroyed including all the local copies/backups I could restore the library.  (Keys are in a cloud vault I can recover).

 

I use a program called Chronosync to copy files to the Aurender when I decide I want to update them.  I use it mainly because it is macOS aware and will use APFS snapshots and I can easily prevent things that macOS Finder cares about like .DS_Store files from ever being copied to Aurender.  The Aurender would ignore them so this in some ways is just my own attention to fine detail being satisfied.

 

Circling back to main point is that backups are critically important and many ways to accomplish them.  I am not in any criticizing the post here just offering another perspective including DR.

 

I hope the community if nothing else finds this interesting :)  

 

Cheers,

Carlin Smith

 

 

[SirAtilla]

3 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Hi Carlin, I love your approach! Thanks so much for sharing it. You’ve given me some things to think about when crafting my next article about DR, which should address @jrobbins50 issue. 
 

Wow, the good ole Escient music servers. Thankfully those are long gone. Similar to the early Request servers that couldn’t even rip bit perfect audio. 

 

walk down memory lane with Escient Fireball, two Sony ES 777 400 disc changers connected to it, Sunfire processor and theatre grand amp, B&W 800 series of the time, Kimber cabling, 18 years ago roughly.