What is the most cost effective method of backing up media library?
I am planning on ripping my music collection to APE files. After I have done this, I do not want to lose all of that data if my HD crashes. Sure, I have the CDs, however, the time lost would be tremendous. I have ~750 CDs, so if each one takes 8 minutes to rip and encode, the you are looking at 6000 minutes of encoding... or 4.1667 days of encoding. I'm also looking at somewhere in the range of 300 GB to start with. I don't mind doing it once, but I certainly don't want to do it again, and I am williing to buy extra equipement to back it all up.
I am sure that there are other people out there with large music collections that they don't want to see destroyed by a faulty HD.
I can think of a few options:
1) Copy each album of APEs onto a CD. Since CD-Rs are cheap, just rip and then burn and then store back on the spindle. Rinse and repeat.
Pros: Cheap. CD-RW will already be in system and blanks are quite cheap.
Cons: This however, is probably the most time consuming option. Add 4 minutes to every rip that takes place.
2) Copy the albums to a DVD-RW+RW media.
Pros: Disks have higher capacity than do CD-Rs, so fewer disks will be needed.
Cons: Have to by DVD-RW+RW burner. Plus, even if you are storing 8 albums per DVD, you are looking at 100 or so DVDs. Still not a nice clean system.
3) External Tape backup
Pros: Even larger media. Increasing backup size is easy, get more tapes.
Cons: Linear access to data. Cost.
4) Buy Extra HDs and Mirror the files. Possibly using a program like
MirrorFolder to help automate the process.
Pros: Gives you an exact duplicate of the files. Easy process.
Cons: Cost? For every hard drive you buy for storage of your media Lib, you have to buy a second one for the backup.
This final method is what I intend to do. I am getting a 4x 5.25 external bay firewire device and putting my drives in that. For starters, I put in drives 1A and 1B. Rip and fill 1A, copying all files to 1B. Once 1A and 1B are filled and mirrored, remove 1B and insert 2A and 2B. Repeat process (ripping to 2A, copying to 2B) until done with music. Keep drives 1A and 2A in the multibay firewire enclosure for use and keep 1B and 2B in a safe place for problems.
I plan on getting 200GB drives since they seem to have about the same $/MB as other drives these days and they decrease the number of drives that I will have.
I'd love to hear any other suggestions, recomendations or tales from people reguarding backup.
-kiwi