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Topic: Thoughts about off-site backup of collection (Read 6426 times) previous topic - next topic
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Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

I have my entire CD collection (~600 CD's) plus a load of other stuff sitting on a 1TB hard disk. It's taken a fair bit of effort getting it there and my thoughts have now turned to adding redundancy. I believe this should be away from where I live and in more than one location, preferably. So I've (nearly) decided to give all my 'stuff' to a couple of friends at work, both of whom have at least 4TB of available network storage. The only thing that puts me off is how can I ensure that it remains a true backup?

I'm not asking them to store my hard drives, rather my collection will go into their arrays. For their trouble, I'm happy for them to access and enjoy the music but I don't want anything being changed. Has anyone had experience in this area?

Cheers

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #1 –
You would probably be better off getting yourself a second 1TB HDD and storing it in your desk drawer at work.
lossyWAV -q X -a 4 -s h -A --feedback 2 --limit 15848 --scale 0.5 | FLAC -5 -e -p -b 512 -P=4096 -S- (having set foobar to output 24-bit PCM; scaling by 0.5 gives the ANS headroom to work)

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #2 –
There's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent them from changing the data. It will reside on drives over which they have full administrative control - read, write, modify, delete.

The best you could manage is to checksum the files so you can tell if they've been changed.

As Nick.C says, a spare 1TB drive is the simplest solution, or you could store it online, e.g. on Skydrive.

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #3 –

if both your network storage support 'rsync' and you can connect over the internet, then you can create 1 way backup jobs that will ensure that the destination always remeains a bit for bit duplciate.

google rsync and/or rsync over ssh for details

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #5 –
Quote from: Nick.C on
You would probably be better off getting yourself a second 1TB HDD and storing it in your desk drawer at work.


I second this idea, or third it.

I have more than 1200 audio CDs encoded to FLAC on an external USB 2.0  1 TB drive, as well as transcoded to V2 VBR MP3, and AAC.

I purchased another external 1 TB drive (should be only around $100 USD now), duplicated the first drive, and place this second drive in a different location.

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #6 –
http://www.backblaze.com/ This could be a reasonably cheap solution for offsite backup.

For myself, I run a FreeBSD fileserver with Zettabyte Filesystem at home. The drives are in a RAID10 configuration and I create snapshots daily. Not really a offsite backup as the server is just in another room , but still much better than most solutions out there IMHO.
Blubb

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #7 –
I just copy to another HDD and store at my parents in a fire proof safe  I also have everything transcoded to MP3 at work.
 

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #8 –
Quote from: Porcus on
If you want to sync over internet, check your bandwidth ...


2nd this.  The majority of ISPs (at least in terms of user subscribers) have either a hard limit (AT&T) or a soft limit (Comcast) of how much data you can transfer over your internet each month.  These are usually rather small numbers like 250GB or less.

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #9 –
Quote from: SCOTU on
Quote from: Porcus on
If you want to sync over internet, check your bandwidth ...


2nd this.  The majority of ISPs (at least in terms of user subscribers) have either a hard limit (AT&T) or a soft limit (Comcast) of how much data you can transfer over your internet each month.  These are usually rather small numbers like 250GB or less.

But once your initial sync is done incremental backups take relatively small amounts.  I did my initial backup (~2TB) over the course of a couple of weeks, but I didn't care because it was free, not like I have to sit there and watch my NAS rsync.

Creature of habit.

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #10 –
Quote from: Soap on
But once your initial sync is done incremental backups take relatively small amounts.  I did my initial backup (~2TB) over the course of a couple of weeks, but I didn't care because it was free, not like I have to sit there and watch my NAS rsync.


You must have pretty fast internet to do 2 TB in a couple of weeks.  A lot of internet service is very asymmetrical, with much less upload bandwidth than down.  While I could easily download 2 TB in less than a week, uploading that would take over 12.  That is with one of the faster internet packages available here.  That's not taking into account transfer limits.  2 TB would be over my yearly transfer limit.

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #11 –
Edit: @ Washu, read my second paragraph.


Quote from: Soap on
But once your initial sync is done incremental backups take relatively small amounts.  I did my initial backup (~2TB) over the course of a couple of weeks, but I didn't care because it was free, not like I have to sit there and watch my NAS rsync.


It all depends. If you have a high-speed symmetric line, it could be feasible.  Where I live, upload capacities over ADSL or internet-over-cable-TV lines have upload capacities in the low-single-figure Mbit / sec range.  1 Mbit/sec is fairly close to the usual lossless file. Copying would be in the 1:1 order of magnitude: 1 second copying for 1 second music.

That is, if you are expanding your discs, you should not do this. However, in order to verify that the copy is in sync you need only transfer checksums.


(And: don't use "rsync", use "rdiff" -- if you accidentally destroy a file at home, you don't want the error to duplicate to your backups, you want to get warned that there is a difference.)

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #12 –
Quote from: simonh on
I have my entire CD collection (~600 CD's) plus a load of other stuff sitting on a 1TB hard disk. It's taken a fair bit of effort getting it there and my thoughts have now turned to adding redundancy. I believe this should be away from where I live and in more than one location, preferably. So I've (nearly) decided to give all my 'stuff' to a couple of friends at work, both of whom have at least 4TB of available network storage. The only thing that puts me off is how can I ensure that it remains a true backup?

I'm not asking them to store my hard drives, rather my collection will go into their arrays. For their trouble, I'm happy for them to access and enjoy the music but I don't want anything being changed. Has anyone had experience in this area?

Cheers

"Giving" your music collection to people at work to store on "their" works computers may get you and/or your friends fired from some companies.

I tend to use portable USB drives carried in my briefcase with dd or rsync to backup full disks or sync directories. Like someone earlier, I keep them in a draw of my desk when not in my briefcase.

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #13 –
Quote from: Porcus on
That is, if you are expanding your discs, you should not do this. However, in order to verify that the copy is in sync you need only transfer checksums.


Still, if you need to restore from a disaster, 2 TB would be 8 months quota at 250 GB/month.  If you can only restore over the network, it's not viable.

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #14 –
I have two 2 TB drives, one on my desktop and one in my safe deposit box at the bank.

Every so often I swap the drives and sync them (with new titles and other changes) so they're identical.  It's a manual effort, but I've gotten good at it.

The safe deposit box costs about $8/month.

Thoughts about off-site backup of collection

Reply #15 –
Quote from: DonP on
Quote from: Porcus on
That is, if you are expanding your discs, you should not do this. However, in order to verify that the copy is in sync you need only transfer checksums.


Still, if you need to restore from a disaster, 2 TB would be 8 months quota at 250 GB/month.  If you can only restore over the network, it's not viable.


Sure. So the suggestion is rather
(1) do all copying -- apart from miniscule updates (like, correcting tags on a single album) -- on physically the same location (hell, myself I even open the USB enclosures and connect up eSATA for this)
(2) use the 'net to verify the copies are equal
(3) restoration is a special case of (1): "all copying".