Article: Cloud Music Library Backup

[DuckToller]

Excellent article, @Dan Gravell, something which guides the reader fluently through a decision path/process.
 

I have been there lately and decided against online backup at the moment, but I may look for a selection of albums and playlists to be backed up in the cloud in the future.

I am a far shot away from the collection size of @The Computer Audiophile or @jrobbins50, however including all other data incl. photos and videos as a driver demand is surely above 10TB, but the rate of data growth has been slowed down in the last 3 years, mostly by fiber connection and corresponding streaming services for video and music, while having arrived concomitant at a fairly complete collection for my needs at the other hand. growth drivers have been rather photos & mobilke phone backups  lately ...

After re-visiting some of the helpful threads in the forums, I chose to upgrade my live NAS and to redress my 2012 desktop machine into a NAS using any disk above 1TB I had acquired since 2009 as backup. Plan is to do an automated backup once a week. Number two will be a mini-ITX-tower using 3 oversized HDDs. This one will be stored at a different location and only synced every other month.
 

As I feel that cloud data services (perhaps except for the Norwegian ones) have proved unreliable in terms of price, quantity, customer data protection and life cycle, I may consider using them only for selected items which are the core of the music I am usually listening to. Which is far  less than 5 % of the collection and would be more playlist oriented than complete albums.

During the process of analyzing and planning I have learned how much data our family's digital life has assembled in the last 25 years. There are obviously some parts more than doubled by older incoherent backup strategies, however losing them incidentally would be something great of a drama and imaging that scenario also convinced the treasury that an investment into back up tech is a wise transfer. Far easier to negotiate than buying a new pair of loudspeakers. ... cheaper too ...

One important driver for taking care of the data available in our household and in the cloud, has been the example of Tidal (suddenly but not unexpected) changing the format of the streaming files into lossy and MQA's attempt into dominating the consumers' choices. Being able to rely on the lossless format of my music in the future and to pass it on to my sons, imho,  is the most serious driver for me and demands a coherent back up planning.

Cheers, Tom

 

Cheers, Tom