NAS

[yves]

Apr 8, 2014 23:46:29 GMT -5 GreenKiwi said:

Actually, it's off site, not off line:

• At least three copies
• In two different formats
• with one of those copies off-site.

blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/world-backup-day-the-3-2-1-rule/

I disagree with others comments about the most cost effective being offline backups. Assuming you are not on a metered broadband connection and have at least 10mbps upstream, $50/year gets you 1TB,2TB,3TB of backup? With crashplan the same backup app will backup to both a local drive and off site. So you get fast recovery and true disaster safety.

While I agree the pricing is pretty good (as you can see here), if you have more than a few TB of data to back up it will actually take longer than forever to upload. They do offer the option of sending a harddrive to your home, backing up locally (very fast), and then mailing it back, but the pricing on this option is too steep for me to even consider it. On a side note, my broadband connection is "unlimited", but it comes with a Fair Use Policy (FUP) so, in reality, even though I am paying around $100 / month for this connection, which is 150 Mb/s downstream, it's still being metered enough for me to not be able to see this thing happening in a near future over here.

[KeithL]

I'd have to agree with "multiple copies" - and I want at least two of them to be under my physical control.

"Cloud" options are great for short-term security (if you drop your hard drive or it gets stolen), and for availability (accessing your music from a hotel). They're also good for "on the fly" backup - as a place to toss a copy of today's work files to at the end of the day (or automatically) in case your computer won't boot up in the morning. But, in the end, you're still trusting someone else - a COMPANY - to keep track of your music.

What if they go out of business?... or get bought by somebody else who decides they don't sell THAT product any more? (I've had that experience with backup software; suddenly you can't buy it any more, or it won't run on the current copy of Windows, or the new version of BackupXXX won't read your old backup files, so you can't access your backups any more. If you have actual copies of the full files, with checksums, then you'll always be able to read and verify them.)

What if someday they're just.... gone.... along with the link to your music files?

What if someday it turns out that they haven't been doing their backups like they should?

What if you're the one unlucky guy whose stuff is on the one server they forgot to back up?

As one of multiple backup copies, they're fine - but I wouldn't trust ANY company with the only copy of my music.... there's simply too much that can go wrong.

Apr 9, 2014 2:57:11 GMT -5 yves said:

Apr 8, 2014 23:46:29 GMT -5 GreenKiwi said:

Actually, it's off site, not off line:

• At least three copies
• In two different formats
• with one of those copies off-site.

blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/world-backup-day-the-3-2-1-rule/

I disagree with others comments about the most cost effective being offline backups. Assuming you are not on a metered broadband connection and have at least 10mbps upstream, $50/year gets you 1TB,2TB,3TB of backup? With crashplan the same backup app will backup to both a local drive and off site. So you get fast recovery and true disaster safety.

While I agree the pricing is pretty good (as you can see here), if you have more than a few TB of data to back up it will actually take longer than forever to upload. They do offer the option of sending a harddrive to your home, backing up locally (very fast), and then mailing it back, but the pricing on this option is too steep for me to even consider it. On a side note, my broadband connection is "unlimited", but it comes with a Fair Use Policy (FUP) so, in reality, even though I am paying around $100 / month for this connection, which is 150 Mb/s downstream, it's still being metered enough for me to not be able to see this thing happening in a near future over here.

[hemster]

Apr 9, 2014 10:03:51 GMT -5 KeithL said:

I'd have to agree with "multiple copies" - and I want at least two of them to be under my physical control.

"Cloud" options are great for short-term security (if you drop your hard drive or it gets stolen), and for availability (accessing your music from a hotel). They're also good for "on the fly" backup - as a place to toss a copy of today's work files to at the end of the day (or automatically) in case your computer won't boot up in the morning. But, in the end, you're still trusting someone else - a COMPANY - to keep track of your music.

What if they go out of business?... or get bought by somebody else who decides they don't sell THAT product any more? (I've had that experience with backup software; suddenly you can't buy it any more, or it won't run on the current copy of Windows, or the new version of BackupXXX won't read your old backup files, so you can't access your backups any more. If you have actual copies of the full files, with checksums, then you'll always be able to read and verify them.)

What if someday they're just.... gone.... along with the link to your music files?

What if someday it turns out that they haven't been doing their backups like they should?

What if you're the one unlucky guy whose stuff is on the one server they forgot to back up?

As one of multiple backup copies, they're fine - but I wouldn't trust ANY company with the only copy of my music.... there's simply too much that can go wrong.

Apr 9, 2014 2:57:11 GMT -5 yves said:

While I agree the pricing is pretty good (as you can see here), if you have more than a few TB of data to back up it will actually take longer than forever to upload. They do offer the option of sending a harddrive to your home, backing up locally (very fast), and then mailing it back, but the pricing on this option is too steep for me to even consider it. On a side note, my broadband connection is "unlimited", but it comes with a Fair Use Policy (FUP) so, in reality, even though I am paying around $100 / month for this connection, which is 150 Mb/s downstream, it's still being metered enough for me to not be able to see this thing happening in a near future over here.

^That's my dilemma too. I don't want to entrust anyone (a 3^rd party) with my music. I'd much rather have it in my control. These days, traveling with an external USB drive is no big deal - they're light enough and therefore it's easy to carry ALL of one's music collection on travels. My work takes me to far away places, sometimes for extended periods (3-4 weeks) and I do carry my primary USB drive with me. 

I have been thinking about getting another USB drive and storing it in the safe deposit box at the bank with other important papers. Many would have the option to store a copy at work in a drawer/locker (I work from home when not on the road). 

[yves]

Apr 9, 2014 10:03:51 GMT -5 KeithL said:

I'd have to agree with "multiple copies" - and I want at least two of them to be under my physical control.

"Cloud" options are great for short-term security (if you drop your hard drive or it gets stolen), and for availability (accessing your music from a hotel). They're also good for "on the fly" backup - as a place to toss a copy of today's work files to at the end of the day (or automatically) in case your computer won't boot up in the morning. But, in the end, you're still trusting someone else - a COMPANY - to keep track of your music.

What if they go out of business?... or get bought by somebody else who decides they don't sell THAT product any more? (I've had that experience with backup software; suddenly you can't buy it any more, or it won't run on the current copy of Windows, or the new version of BackupXXX won't read your old backup files, so you can't access your backups any more. If you have actual copies of the full files, with checksums, then you'll always be able to read and verify them.)

What if someday they're just.... gone.... along with the link to your music files?

What if someday it turns out that they haven't been doing their backups like they should?

What if you're the one unlucky guy whose stuff is on the one server they forgot to back up?

As one of multiple backup copies, they're fine - but I wouldn't trust ANY company with the only copy of my music.... there's simply too much that can go wrong.

Apr 9, 2014 2:57:11 GMT -5 yves said:

While I agree the pricing is pretty good (as you can see here), if you have more than a few TB of data to back up it will actually take longer than forever to upload. They do offer the option of sending a harddrive to your home, backing up locally (very fast), and then mailing it back, but the pricing on this option is too steep for me to even consider it. On a side note, my broadband connection is "unlimited", but it comes with a Fair Use Policy (FUP) so, in reality, even though I am paying around $100 / month for this connection, which is 150 Mb/s downstream, it's still being metered enough for me to not be able to see this thing happening in a near future over here.

Yes, part of the reason why I own 14 external harddrives is because having more 1:1 copies of the same data is safer and because harddrives, optical discs, USB sticks, flash memory cards, SSDs, etc. are all fairly unreliable, and, yes, it's better not to fully trust those online storage companies either, at least not when it comes to storing critically important data.

The only thing that somewhat worries me about keeping my external harddrives stored at home is the risk of a fire or burglary, but this can be relatively easy to work around by keeping an extra copy stored at a different safe place such as a friend's or family member's, or maybe even in a safety deposit box if it's really that critically important, but then the integrity of the harddrive(s) still *must* be verified on a regular basis because else it can turn out to be even far more disastrous than going with one of those online storage companies.

[Deleted]

Apr 8, 2014 20:11:14 GMT -5 lsdeep said:

Apr 8, 2014 19:15:09 GMT -5 johnnyd70 said:

Ever look at iTunes Match? The simplest solution of all - offline backup for security and streaming to devices that support Airplay. It's cheap at around $20/yr. Only drawback is that you're limited and confined to the Apple universe somewhat. I use a combination of iTunes Match and NAS for local backup.

beside being cheap ($20 for how many tb???) - i just don't trust cloud storage for anything important to me. the company might pack in, raise prices, big brother is going to your stuff.....

[Deleted]

ITunes Match will allow up to 25000 songs. As far as trust goes, it's Apple, so either you trust them or you don't. Keep in mind you still have a copy on your primary machine or 'matched' account. It just serves as online backup and streaming to another iOS device or Mac. I'm not sure why the Feds would be interested in my music, but you never know these days. Maybe you were thinking of iCloud? That's entirely different and I could see your point there.

[ratmice]

One more vote for UnRAID here. Been using it for years. Easy to try. Uses any old hardware. Runs off a USB flash drive. JBOD w/ parity protection so you can have a drive go belly up and still use the data on it and it will rebuild onto a new drive. 22 drive limit (so 88TB possible - although parity drive must be deducted). Diagonal (2 drive) parity coming - so it will be able to recover from 2 simultaneously dead drives. Runs in VM if you're into that kind of thing. Vibrant forums for support. Some incredibly knowledgeable people there.

[KeithL]

unRAID looks like a pretty good deal (I haven't tried it personally).

As I said in another post, I'm also a fan of CRC utilities (once you generate a CRC list for all the files on a particular drive, you can then use that list to verify all the files on that drive without having to connect another drive to compare them to; you just compare their CRCs to the list). There are several standards for CRC checksums, and many file managers (I like Total Commander) have an option to verify folders using one or more of the common ones. You can even set a Windows file association, so simply double-clicking on the CRC list file initiates the file verification. (The CRC generator I like is CDCheck - and it can do CRC checksum lists for individual files, folders, or entire drives.)

There is also the "grand-daddy" of all file verification and recovery software - QuickPAR. (QuickPAR is eternally stuck in v.0.9.1 but is quite stable ). QuickPAR actually delivers what they call "file level RAID". You point it at a folder full of files and, instead of creating RAID volumes, it creates RAID files. One of those files is simply a tiny file which holds CRC information; the others hold redundant information which can be used to repair damaged files or replace missing ones. Basically, you double click on the index file, and QPar  checks the files that are "protected". It tells you if they are all OK and, if not, it tells you how many are missing or damaged and informs you if it has enough redundant information files to undo the damage. If yes, you simply click "start" and it repairs or replaces the missing files - restoring them to their original state, and then confirming that they are indeed now perfect again. Within certain limitations, QPar can repair or replace any number of damaged or missing files as long as the total number of blocks of data that are missing or damaged is less than the amount of redundant information you have.  (You get to choose how much extra repair data to save when you create the "backup set".) QPar is VERY popular for BBS file uploads, especially on UseNet - where missing or damaged files are common, but it also works very well for any files you are especially concerned about. (QPar only has two serious drawbacks that I know of: First, it only works on a single folder at a time. Second, checking files is pretty quick, and repairs aren't too bad - and you don't use that option all that often, but the process of creating the backup sets is VERY slow. Assuming you plan to keep separate backup copies anyway, a simple CRC generator is hundreds or thousands of times quicker.)

[lsdeep]

Apr 9, 2014 12:57:12 GMT -5 ratmice said:

One more vote for UnRAID here. Been using it for years. Easy to try. Uses any old hardware. Runs off a USB flash drive. JBOD w/ parity protection so you can have a drive go belly up and still use the data on it and it will rebuild onto a new drive. 22 drive limit (so 88TB possible - although parity drive must be deducted). Diagonal (2 drive) parity coming - so it will be able to recover from 2 simultaneously dead drives. Runs in VM if you're into that kind of thing. Vibrant forums for support. Some incredibly knowledgeable people there.

just to update one piece of info, it is upped to 24hdd's now, considering one parity drive you basically could get 92tb of data storage.

cheers, L

[GreenKiwi]

With 6tb drives you're at 138tb.

[lsdeep]

Apr 11, 2014 0:02:52 GMT -5 GreenKiwi said:

With 6tb drives you're at 138tb.

LOL, true, but considering the price diff. 4tb to 6tb hdd you would poss be cheaper off to build a second server for the next 24 drives 

[Chuck Elliot]

I've been experimenting with the new WD Cloud device.


WD Cloud product page

I bought the 2TB device which serves as both a cloud device and a DLNA server. 4TB unit available.

With the cloud server, I can get at my music on either my iPhone or iPad device with a WD app installed. An Android and Desktop version is also available. The app has a few minor bugs, but no show stoppers.

I connect to the DLNA via my Sony BDP-S6200.

Works very well. I had a friend connect to my iCloud server from the Bahamas with flawless operation.

[bub]

Apr 11, 2014 21:01:42 GMT -5 Chuck Elliot said:

I've been experimenting with the new WD Cloud device.


WD Cloud product page

I bought the 2TB device which serves as both a cloud device and a DLNA server. 4TB unit available.

With the cloud server, I can get at my music on either my iPhone or iPad device with a WD app installed. An Android and Desktop version is also available. The app has a few minor bugs, but no show stoppers.

I connect to the DLNA via my Sony BDP-S6200.

Works very well. I had a friend connect to my iCloud server from the Bahamas with flawless operation.

I looked at them tonight. Are they dedicated? I'm using Windows. And the little one uses Mac. Would she be able to access ?

[redog]

Apr 8, 2014 12:52:07 GMT -5 hemster said:

I spent a very long time organizing my music collection (30,000+ tracks) and really don't want to re-do that. Some of the music I have is rare and I'm quite sure, irreplaceable.

My current approach that has served me well is to have 3 USB drives. One is the primary (A) which I use to stream music from and the other 2 are backups. Whenever I add/make changes to the collection, it's always on the primary (A). Then I sync to the other 2 drives (B & C) using a simple Robocopy command. If any drive were to fail, I will simply replace it with a new one and not run the risk of losing my music. The backup drives are physically stored in separate locations around the house, providing redundancy in case of theft. For not much coin, I sleep peacefully knowing my music is protected from loss. Of course a fire or such catastrophic damage means lights out and I'm pondering making another drive copy and storing that at the bank safe deposit vault with other important paperwork.

So....how much for one of those usb drives? Preloaded of course. ; )

[Chuck Elliot]

Apr 11, 2014 21:59:26 GMT -5 bub said:

I looked at them tonight. Are they dedicated? I'm using Windows. And the little one uses Mac. Would she be able to access ?

Not sure what you mean by dedicated? The unit plugs into my network, no USB, and the management programs are available for both Windows and MAC.

[novisnick]

Apr 11, 2014 22:23:58 GMT -5 Chuck Elliot said:

Apr 11, 2014 21:59:26 GMT -5 bub said:

I looked at them tonight. Are they dedicated? I'm using Windows. And the little one uses Mac. Would she be able to access ?

Not sure what you mean by dedicated? The unit plugs into my network, no USB, and the management programs are available for both Windows and MAC.

Looks like you only need an internet connection and the software on each PC or/and Mac, oh yes ,,,,and a password or account that you set up.
does that sound right Chuck?

[Chuck Elliot]

Apr 11, 2014 22:31:11 GMT -5 novisnick said:

Apr 11, 2014 22:23:58 GMT -5 Chuck Elliot said:

Not sure what you mean by dedicated? The unit plugs into my network, no USB, and the management programs are available for both Windows and MAC.

Looks like you only need an internet connection and the software on each PC or/and Mac, oh yes ,,,,and a password or account that you set up.
does that sound right Chuck?

Exactly! Except that once setup you don't even need to use the software to populate the server with music files. It just presents itself as a server.
You do need the program to play on a PC or app to play on a phone/tablet.

[hemster]

Apr 11, 2014 22:07:51 GMT -5 redog said:

Apr 8, 2014 12:52:07 GMT -5 hemster said:

I spent a very long time organizing my music collection (30,000+ tracks) and really don't want to re-do that. Some of the music I have is rare and I'm quite sure, irreplaceable.

My current approach that has served me well is to have 3 USB drives. One is the primary (A) which I use to stream music from and the other 2 are backups. Whenever I add/make changes to the collection, it's always on the primary (A). Then I sync to the other 2 drives (B & C) using a simple Robocopy command. If any drive were to fail, I will simply replace it with a new one and not run the risk of losing my music. The backup drives are physically stored in separate locations around the house, providing redundancy in case of theft. For not much coin, I sleep peacefully knowing my music is protected from loss. Of course a fire or such catastrophic damage means lights out and I'm pondering making another drive copy and storing that at the bank safe deposit vault with other important paperwork.

So....how much for one of those usb drives? Preloaded of course. ; )

Well, assuming you share my taste in muzak.... 

Seriously, I have a varied interest in music from all over the world. 

[redog]

Apr 11, 2014 22:43:50 GMT -5 hemster said:

Apr 11, 2014 22:07:51 GMT -5 redog said:

So....how much for one of those usb drives? Preloaded of course. ; )

Well, assuming you share my taste in muzak.... 

Seriously, I have a varied interest in music from all over the world. 

I never let my friends listen to my music! I listen to everything. If it sounds good, I don't care who, what, makes it.

[hemster]

Apr 11, 2014 22:48:38 GMT -5 redog said:

Apr 11, 2014 22:43:50 GMT -5 hemster said:

Well, assuming you share my taste in muzak.... 

Seriously, I have a varied interest in music from all over the world. 

I never let my friends listen to my music! I listen to everything. If it sounds good, I don't care who, what, makes it.

... Or how they make it! 

I do let my friends listen to my collection... but they say I'm a crazy chimp... what do they know?