Comment by matwood
7 years ago
So where do you store these files that you'll never lose access?
CDs? People with a room full of 8 tracks or cassettes would like to have a word.
HDDs? Those fail all the time, plus any sort of natural disaster could wipe out your collection.
Online backup? This seems like the only real option, but for me the risk/reward just doesn't fit.
At least for now, the record companies and the service providers are both incentivized to have as much of their catalogs as possible on streaming services. Until that changes, streaming works for many.
One copy on each of:
-My desktop at home
-My server in the basement
-My work laptop's external hard drive
-An external hard drive in a fireproof lockbox (server backup)
-An external hard drive on a shelf at work (server backup)
-An external hard drive in my parent's house 150 miles away (server backup)
Try prying my files from my cold dead hands.
How do you keep them all in sync when you rip new music?
I put it on my desktop. I back it up to the server. Over the next few weeks/months, I connect an external drive to the server, update, and swap with the other 2. The work laptop drive gets updated from the server over rsync/SSH when I want to listen to my new stuff (almost right away).
At least for now, the record companies and the service providers are both incentivized to have as much of their catalogs as possible on streaming services. Until that changes, streaming works for many.
There is a solution for the rest: let me mix songs from Spotify, my own library, and any other services I pay for in a single playlist.
On my server at home, which has redundant data drives (drivepool) and is backed up locally.
I can access this from every device in my house, and from outside my network.
I can put anything I want onto my phone, USB stick or iPod and play in most any modern car.
Your beef with CDs is they'll become out of date? Did you not read the article, CDs are already pretty much the pinnacle of audio formats.
You don't back up your hard drive?
I had an album (albeit free) on bandcamp dissappear from my library.
Luckily it's on a backed up RAID6 array, in private server, streamable whenever I want.
I mirror all my purchases onto equipment I own, and so I guess I get the benefits of both.
> Online backup? This seems like the only real option, but for me the risk/reward just doesn't fit.
What risk? You can privately store your music anywhere, it's completely legal to do so.
I'm considering which online backup service to use for my music collection, is there a particular one you'd recommend, other than the obvious players like Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive?
Preferably not hosted in the US, for privacy/bandwidth reasons.
Backblaze no question about it. Use encryption and you won't have to worry about privacy. It's expensive to recover your data, so you'll need other backup methods too unless you're made of money.
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I use my own 10€/month 2TB server with OVH but also have it synced to Google Drive.
I wasn't clear. The risk of a streaming service turning off some music vs. storing and backing up everything in some lossless format like FLAC.
Not OP, but my collection is
- stored on the desktop for fast and performant access
- synced to an NAS daily for central access around the house/network
- uploaded offsite to cloud storage daily as backup