Copying your music collection to hard drives: who else is doing this?

I started months ago, and have only in the month stepped it up. Now I am 3/4 finished with the process, and it's exausting! It will be worth it when i'm done!

Unlike others, I have opted to simply back up to two drives, one for everyday use, and one for backup. No RAID, although I can do that. I plan to keep a copy offsite in case of fire or theft, and maybe even a third for extra security.

I am transferring it all to FLAC, using mostly dbpoweramp. Sometimes I will use CD Creator if it is a homemede comp, and sometimes I use Audition with a FLAC filter installed. The only 320kbps copies are of stuff I download and all of my TV Tunes CD collection. The sound isn't that critical for those CDs.

I am keeping seperate sections for artists titles, various artists titles, assorted comps by company and homemede comps, and one for soundtracks.

My collection will include my needle drops. I may keep all of my hi-rez originals on a seperate HD. Since I am not using a network HD, I am hoping that there will be a way I can eventually rig up a network only using a standard external HD without the use of a computer. Right now, I am happy to use the computer.

If I run into a CD-R that no longer rips, I do a fast rip in Audition. If it still doesn't rip, I retrive the LP and redo the needle drop.

I cannot believe that my Samsung DVD-recorder has held up through thousands of CD rips and it's still going strong! It's been a real workhorse.

My main storage is one T1 Maxtor (sith Seagate SATA drive installed). Right now, my backup drives are two 500GB WD MyBook, and I do not trust them, although there have been no mishaps, ecxcept for occasional dropped data. I keep all of my drives defragged and formatted to NTFS.

If I keep this up, I can be finished in another month. I plan to make mp3 copies of everything too. That is why I wanted tom know if there is a software program that will do convert while maintaining the folder structure.

Anyone else doing this?

 

Me too, sort of.

I ripped .wavs (about 1000) to a 40GB HD with 32GB formatted to FAT32 to play through my PS3.

It would have been nice for the PS3 to recognize a 500GB drive so I could rip all of my CD's to folders for instant playback AND backup.

Defragging is easier after 30 or 40 songs.

 

Yes, I've got a 1TB drive with around 850g filled. I have an identical backup in my car for my Squeezebox. I have (4) 750g drives with backups of all but some classical discs. One of those is at my mom's place, and the other three are here.

I feel pretty bullet proof at this point.

I'm not a fan of raid, especially not for this. Raid can protect against a physical failure, but not from a human error, which seems more likely to occur IMO. In fact, I've had 4 drive problems. 2 were killed simultaneously due to power issues but these were only 120g drives at the beginning of my project.

The other two failures were caused by me writing bad data over good. Raid will not help a bit when that happens.

Gosh, do you think this is the one of the record industry's worst nightmare. It's one thing to give a copy of a disc to a friend, but what if somebody was to steal one of our hard drives full of music. In my case that's approacing 4000 discs in one fell swoop.

I'd not give a copy of my hard drive to anybody, but it would surely be easy to do. These are indeed interesting times.

Btw, I have more backups than I really need, but since I keep buying larger drives, I have plenty of drives around here. Might as well fill them up just in case. I think the 1TB will be fine for a while. OTOH, I haven't gotten to needledropping the majority of my vinyl yet.

 

I think Easy CD-DA will maintain folder structure and can go from flac to mp3

I have a machine setup to hold my music files. It has 1.2 TB of space non RAID. I have 2 WD MyBooks, a 1TB and a 500GB model as my backup, I dont really care about their reliability since if they die I can just get another and resync, I mean they are a live backup afterall.

I backup to tape all my needledrops, the original file and the declicked one before dither.

One my music drive I have a structure of

LP Rips
CD Rips
MP3

Everything is FLAC but the mp3 folder

 

With these Mybook type USB drives that look like small books you could just take a terabyte of music to school and pass it around, not like th eold days of hauling a few records over to a friends house and taping

 

It would take a lifetime and it would be one heck of a hard drive.

 

I started to do this and then decided that I just really like the physical process of picking up CDs and especially LPs, walking over to my collection, etc. Squeezebox, etc., are cool, but I guess I just really like the physical medium. Enjoy!

 

That's what locking a hard drive with a password could do, and is what I can do with my T1 drive. That waym, if the HD is stolen, the music on it would be of no use. They would have to reformat and then they would lose all that music.

I love redunancy. I spent all that money and time getting that collection. Having backups helps at least preserve the music.


I especially want to back up my needle drops. Some of the vinyl I no longer have, and I spent sooo much time doing them over the years.

 

BTW, if I hook up two external HDs via USB and/or firewire, how do I sync them in XP so I don't have to copy files twice?

 

Wouldn'
t you feel devistated if you lost all that musioc to a fire?

You can back up the music and still enjoy the physical mediums. Me? I just choose to pack up the LPs and CDs to cut clutter.

 

Based on the pics you have posted in the past... you're right.

Has the Library Of Congress ever approached you for what they don't have ?

 

Yes, I thought of that, but not sure how the Squeezebox could deal with it.

 

I started this over a year ago with my vinyl collection. 90% of the collection(LP's & 45 singles) is done. I ripped everything in .wav format. And then finally, I copied those files to DVD-R discs.

 

Yeah, that's why I would do it. Perhaps I will sometime. I guess I could keep my back-up in my office.

Of course, I have apartment-renters insurance, so I should be able to replace a lot of stuff.

 

I use a freeware program called Deltacopy

http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp

 

But, some things are just irreplacable!

 

Thanks!

 

I have all my CDs ripped as MP3 and it took 2 weeks while I was unemployed. It would take two months now. But I'm going to do it to make FLAC files. I'm about to pull the trigger on the Drobo and now Drobo has a nifty network adapter for it. Once I have all my CDs on the Drobo it will be time to get serious about making needledrops. To me, that is the real daunting prospect. I just can't view it like a project. I'll probably play catch up with my recently acquired audiophile vinyl and stay ahead with that stuff...like the Music Matters titles. Then add a little here and there.

I'll be interested in seeing how effortless dbpoweramp makes building a well-tagged flac library from my CDs.

 

Tagging? All I care about is the song title and artist.

 

I have ripped all of mine using eac to flac files onto a 750gb hd and have backed up the oop/htf music on a 500gb hd. What made me do it was when I shipped my music from the UK to New Zealand, just in case things went missing.

 

BUT, what I want to do is simultaneously copy one or more files to two different hard drives. I didn't see where this program allows me to do that.

 

Not the album or genre? The more tags I can get an app using a service like CDDB to fill, the better.

There's been a fair bit of Vista bashing, deservedly so, but Windows Explorer's search capabilities in Vista are so good that I won't bother searching a drive to make a playlist with XP. I search on the Vista box that the media drive on the XP box is shared to. Vista will apply a search term to pretty much any tag on an MP3 file. I know nothing about how well this will work with FLAC files.

 

This also helps because I misplace CDs right when I need them. So, with backups, I have them available to copy onto CD-R.

 

So you're copying everything to FLAC so you can find your stuff?

How it the hell do you file your cds anways.

 

I started backing up my entire collection to FLAC a few months ago. Still have many thousands to go because I'm really silly about it and feel the need to do proper Test & Copy EAC rips as well as scanning all of the booklet and tray artwork at high resolution. Right now I'm just burning them to DVDR and holding on to them for the day I set up some kind of music server. I've tried streaming FLAC from my laptop to my Outlaw RR2150 receiver over USB and it sounds pretty good but I still think my dedicated CD player sounds a bit better. Perhaps one day I will spring for a high quality external DAC that does a better job than the Outlaw's internal one. For now it does a fine job with the mp3's I occasionally play through it.