Backup tags Options

[odyssey]

I want to backup my quite large lossless collection of music to archive media. This should be no problem, but I want to backup my current tags as well on a regular basis to keep them updated in case I have a crash or something.

One method that was mentioned recently in another thread, could be to create dummy mp3-files and copy the tags to these with "Copy info between files". For this, I would create a unique BackupID tag for every file, allowing me to find the tag from the restore pool at a later time. One problem with this is that I need to match the playlist carefully and make sure that no items are left alone. I have no idea how I could create such a playlist only listing files with duplicate BackupID. I guess Playlist Tree's advanced scripting could be a solution, but I haven't got into that yet.

Another way may be to use a scripted solution to extract the tags with a command line utility lige tag.exe or something, but this way I have no idea how I could put them back in.

I'd like to know other ideas for this project, and please no comments about backup regulary the entire collection or something like that (I'm using remote backup, and that would not really be an option).

[odyssey]

Seems to be of no interrest.

However, I did a small batch-script using tag.exe to copy all the tags to dummy files. All tracks are embedded with a unique number, that makes restore easy.

20000 dummy files with my tags takes up just 7 MB in a compressed file. The backup operation takes about 30 min, and can easily be scheduled.

My only limitation is that tag.exe only supports mp3, flac and ogg files (I'd like to backup a few tags from wma and mp4 files as well)

If anyones interrested, I can post it here.

[jantom]

Could you please give more details on how you create dummy files? I have spent a lot of time tagging my music collection with custom tags (classical music) and now I am afraid that while fiddling with tags I can destroy them by accident. I would like to back them up somehow.

Many thanks,
Jan