<sigh> Digital to Analogue

[Clive]

A decent 2Tb drive is/was around the 70 quid mark, so backing up changes is a breeze while retaining library folder structure. Hot swap or usb, the process is simple and fast.

+2

Furthermore, I recommend using 2 backup drives. It's not a matter of if a drive fails, it's when. Just imagine, one drive fails so you buy another and during the copy of your remaining data this other copy of your data is lost. 2 backup drives...please!

[Welder]

I find it hard to believe that there are still people who don't seem to grasp the concept of adequate data backup.
One of the advantages of file based audio is given a sensible backup strategy you should always have available perfect copies of your music and be largely immune to theft, physical media damage,loss and if your smart even sticky fingered rugrats.
3 copies on separate drives is the minimum sensible option as Clive advocates.
If you must use your computer as a storage device then partition it so the operating system and applications are on one partition and your data is on another.
Keep passwords, email addresses, site logins and profiles on a flash drive.
About the only thing i keep on the computer hard drive these days are games simply because unless you have a fast SATA connected drive some games just wont render fast enough to be playable on external storage.

It really doesn't matter what method you use to backup; what's important is that you do it.

[northwest]

Have we completely lost the plot here.

I hate being mis-quoted - TAPE DRIVES BOY, tape drives. Hard drives are bobbins. The man was talking about backing up to TAPE drives. I don't advocate that. If you want a hard copy then DVD is good. If you want to back up to another HDD - go right ahead, knock yourself out.

[bobbasrah]

I hate being mis-quoted - TAPE DRIVES BOY, tape drives. Hard drives are bobbins. The man was talking about backing up to TAPE drives. I don't advocate that. If you want a hard copy then DVD is good. If you want to back up to another HDD - go right ahead, knock yourself out.

Ditto.
Your comment re tape drive was noted and I agree, but did not feel the need to comment further on it.
The rest of my post dealt with other elements that had been raised, which was the reason for the opening comment.
My last observation on your suggestion to use 170+ DVD as a backup stands in my own case, as these days hard drive is by far fastest and cheapest solution.

[YNWaN]

Yes, at least 2 backup drives - as Clive states, it is not a question of 'if' it is definitely a question of 'when'.

[seoirse2002]

I note that nobody is mentioning online backup....any reason why not?

[northwest]

Ditto.
Your comment re tape drive was noted and I agree, but did not feel the need to comment further on it.
The rest of my post dealt with other elements that had been raised, which was the reason for the opening comment.
My last observation on your suggestion to use 170+ DVD as a backup stands in my own case, as these days hard drive is by far fastest and cheapest solution.

Sorry, I don't mean to be contentious, a decent DAT drive is money and a good DLT drive is big money, in the scheme of things. I thought you had missed my reference to Tape Drives. When you consider the cost of HDD's these days they are good value for money. Fast too. However, sods law always intercedes (in my experience) and I prefer to have a backup on DVD too. It is pretty inert as a medium and I just feel comfortable seeing my backups stored neatly in their cases. Alongside a couple of terrabyte drives.
For the record, during the Christmas Holidays I put a hammer through five 500Gb drives after swapping them out of the enclosures. I personally destroy my data and on the day the paranoia checking and double checking that the backups are backed up is enough to make me physically ill

[Stratmangler]

I note that nobody is mentioning online backup....any reason why not?

I have not far short of 1TB of lossless files - what's the annual charge for backing that lot up, and how much DSL bandwidth would it take to accomplish the task.

Answer = rather a lot

[Smoker]

im glad the backup side is being looked into with peoples precious collections, to be fair tape drives were a simple example if funds allow for it, in the case of long term care and storage whatever your choices are be it on other hdd's or dvds the main point like has been said is that everything is duplicated.

i didnt want go into the grandfather, father son routine lol but in any case single copies of anything precious should be a no no. Ive helped those whose choice has been dvd/hdd and tape and each have their own benefits and aslong as we stick to our chosen strategy recovery shouldnt be such a headache.

I like the wise words about your own files not being kept on system drives, on a similar note i installed windows 7 system on a small drive which was upgraded to a larger drive afterwards, I copied over the partition ensuring the new drive was bootable and have kept the other drive just in case...lol
the documents/videos/photos and music folders all reside on different drives.

[AlexM]

Trouble is that flac will die and wav will be back - if we're talking sound quality. Why? The best players are in-memory. Flacs have to be "exploded" back in a wav for an in-memory player to work. Saving a bit a disk space is irrelevant today, let alone in the next year or two. The processing power used during the explode process with an i5 CPU results in a flac loading in the same time as a wav. Flacs are like disk compression, a passing fad this will be overcome be technology advances.

Welcome to the digital flat earth society

IMHO We shouldn't confuse implementation problems with the pros and cons of file formats. I am a long way from being convinced that there are any issues whatsoever getting the same bits out of a flac.

Stereophile's recent article suggested that wav to flac to wav conversion sounded inferior to the orginal wav file, which is absolutely bonkers. I think that a lot of the audiophile press don't really understand the technology and their brains are stuck in analogue thinking.

I'd really love to know why it is thought that playback of samples from an area of menory is superior to playback from disk, which is actually also playback from memory. I am waiting for someone to say that playback from processor cache is better than playback from main memory