Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Backup Music (What to Do?) (Read 7387 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Hi fellows,

i'm with a big doubt, regarding wich is the best method to backup my original music cd's, i'm thinking on enconding with FLAC.....but my head is a mess when i ask myself where should i put them!!!!! 

Take attencion on the follow:

CD-R (i have seen some threads, that say CD-R aren't reliable for backup and after months or one year they just die....so i will end loosing my backup  ....and some original music cd's are from friends of mine...so you see i have to end asking them over again )

DVD-/+R (From what i have seen DVD-R is more compatible but DVD+R produces less burning errors, also i have heard that what i have written is just a manufacturer fight and this is not true......, anyway in comparation with CD-R there is more potencial to have errors on burning (700mb to 4.7gb no wonder), so i think if CD-R are not reliable with 700mb, what can i think on 4.7gb.

Big Hard Drive (maybe if i add a new 160gb my problems are solved........OR not)


This is universal "Everything Dies",

So what i want to know is...what take more time to die?what of them have some method to warn me so i can make in time a new backup.....

If were you what should you choose or have a new idea...

Many thanks for all the reply's and time.

Sniff.

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #1 –
I would go for a dvd + par2 files solution.
http://www.quickpar.org.uk/

par2 is a system that, as long as you have as much par data as data you need to recover it can recreate everything missing.

That way you can check your discs every 6-12 months and repair what is broken and make a new dvd.


The problem with a HD is IMO that if it breaks hell is loose. You lost all. At least with dvds if a dvd dies you didn't loose that much. And with par2 files you at least often have something you can do about it (unless the file system is dead).

I think CD-rs will be the most expensive solution and unless you can find a very good brand they will start dying at some point.

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #2 –
0,58 € / Gigabyte for HDD (good 160 GB Samsung drive)
0,59 € / Gigabyte for 34xDVD+/-R (Verbatim 4x)

(these are the prices over here)

I would go for the HDD, just think of having to change the disc 34 times - the time spent on this is more important to me. Additionally it's many times faster (reading and writing) and you're more flexible (how to organize, retagging, ... whatever).

If it's really only for backup purposes I'd still go for the HDD, copy everything to it and then put it to some save place... this should be the most reliable solution you can get for the money.

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #3 –
After searching here at my country (Portugal) i got the follow prices:

     
Ridisc DVD-R 4.7Gb Pack 100 4x G04 (by Ritek) - 48 Euros (470GB)

Ritek DVD-R 4.7Gb Pack 100 Printable 4x G04 - 100 Euros (470GB)

DataWrite DVD+RW 4.7Gb Pack 100 4x - 90 Euros (470GB)


On the Hard disk   

Seagate ATA 100 160GB - 98.90 Euros

Hitachi SATA 160GB - 106 Euros


Anyhow, i'm still studing the two possibilities, DVD or HD, cds are already outside of the fight  .

More opinions are always welcome, thanks for the reply's until now.
I really want to make the right choice.

Sniff.

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #4 –
Don't buy noname DVD+/-R, you'll have much trouble...

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #5 –
I use CD-R with par2 recovery files for my lossless backups. I use Taiyo Yuden CD-R blanks, and i check my backups at least twice a year. If a disc has started to get errors, i can be quite certain that i will be able to recover the data using the par2 files. During the next year i will probably start using DVD instead of CD, and i will continue to use par2.

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #6 –
If it's any consolation, read the audio archivists material on the web. Even the professionals aren't sure how to store digital audio long-term!

I think keeping the original CD unused and stored safely away is one option.

Reliable brands of CD-R or DVD-R should be OK for your lifetime if kept safe. However, which brands are reliable over 50 years? IIRC Kodak used to guarantee their CD-R lifetime at 100 years under ideal conditions. Are there DVD-Rs available with a similar guarantee? Will the company be around in 100 years to check? Will you?

HDD isn't long term storage if used continually, and may not be even if unused. However, I think you could reasonably expect one to last five or ten years if you only spin it up once a year. That's more than enough to get you to a point where the replacement cost is absolutely trivial. That's OK, as long as the original and replacement drive will actually slot into the same machine to make a copy!

FWIW we've had a very long thread on this before. Somewhere!

I'd buy a HDD for the convenience.

Garathor's idea of checking hundreds (thousands!) of backup CD-Rs twice a year doesn't appeal to me! Even if a small collection made it more manageable, you can bet it would be during a busy year (when you didn't bother to run checks) that they all started to fail!

Cheers,
David.

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #7 –
I would say we can use the best of each solution :

1) Make a single .mka/flac file backup of each CD (see this topic)

2) Keep all this .mka albums on a big harddisk, so you can have them at your finger tips and you won't need to use your original CDs anymore  (unlesse you have to rip again)

3) If you want to be very safe, just burn your .mka albums on DVD-/+rw (you can make sets by artist or by genre 7-10 albums by DVD). So if your original CD is lost/stollen/damaged and your harddrive is broken (you are not lucky  ), you'll just have to pick what you need from your backup DVDs to reburn your audio CD or restore your harddisk

Don't forget to keep all the media (original CDs / Harddrive / DVD backups) in different places to be very safe... so if there is the fire, a flood or a godzilla attack, not everything will be lost. 

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #8 –
Quote
I would go for a dvd + par2 files solution.
http://www.quickpar.org.uk/

[...]
That way you can check your discs every 6-12 months and repair what is broken and make a new dvd.
[...]

Hi,

I've been experiencing with this par2 thing to backup my backup FLACs.

I was wondering how much data recovery i shoud apply.  Using 10% usualy produce between 30 and 50mb files per album in FLAC!  Is this overkill?! 

I dont know how much data can be corupted on a DVD±R... does anyone had a bad experience with DVD±R??


Thanks

--
be020261

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #9 –
Quote
Quote
I would go for a dvd + par2 files solution.
http://www.quickpar.org.uk/

[...]
That way you can check your discs every 6-12 months and repair what is broken and make a new dvd.
[...]

Hi,

I've been experiencing with this par2 thing to backup my backup FLACs.

I was wondering how much data recovery i shoud apply.  Using 10% usualy produce between 30 and 50mb files per album in FLAC!  Is this overkill?! 

I dont know how much data can be corupted on a DVD±R... does anyone had a bad experience with DVD±R??


Thanks

--
be020261

That is a good question......i would like to know as well

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #10 –
I don't think 10% data recovery (for storing on DVD/CD-R) is enough. It's sufficient for usenet, but e.g. you have an album with 8 tracks and 10% par2 redundancy and one track gets corrupted, you're not just missing a handfull of sectors, but a complete file (unless there are ways to copy just the good sectors of the damaged file). So, in this case, one bad sector result in 12.5% data loss.

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #11 –
par2 is a good option to recover data in case of troubles but how do you do if your par2 files get corrupted or unreadable (cd/dvd)?  at the end it's just like a double backup cos to be entirely sure you'll have to go 100%

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #12 –
There are programs to recover all the good data. That is the whole idea behind par2.

I think 10% would be reasonable and seems like what most people use.
dvds have a sector size of 2048 should your block size should be a multible of 2048 in theory.
But AFAIK you can't align the blocks to the sectors on the dvd so ATM I doubt it makes any practical difference.

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #13 –
Quote
There are programs to recover all the good data. That is the whole idea behind par2.

Sure, I know the basic idea of par2.
But are you sure, e.g. Quickpar is able to recover a file from DVD-R with one or two unreadable sectors when Windows throws a "crc read error" at you and leaves you not with the remaining good sectors but with 0 bytes?

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #14 –
Quote
Quote
There are programs to recover all the good data. That is the whole idea behind par2.

Sure, I know the basic idea of par2.
But are you sure, e.g. Quickpar is able to recover a file from DVD-R with one or two unreadable sectors when Windows throws a "crc read error" at you and leaves you not with the remaining good sectors but with 0 bytes?
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


I think they are talking about something like ISOBUSTER. It's like EAC except for data, not audio.



[a href="http://davidracho.blogspot.com/]David Racho[/url]

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #15 –
has anyone compiled/tested this:
http://dvbackup.sourceforge.net/
(or a similar app for win?)
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #16 –
Whatever method you choose (CD-R, DVD-R, HDD), make sure you use quality media.

In general, it seems like HDD would be most convenient. But some concerns that come to mind with that solution are that:
1. All your eggs (or at least a lot of them) would be in one basket so if your HDD crashes, you're pretty screwed.
2. HDD technology changes a lot. If you put all your backups on HDD today, who's to say that it will still be compatible or usable on computers 10 or 15 years from now (i.e. will all computers be SATA or something else rather than IDE in a few years)? However, this may actually be a good thing since it would force you to copy the files from an old HDD to a new one as the technology changes (as opposed to burning them to CD-R and putting them away never to check on them again for years and years).

CD-R's claim to have a longer lifespan (i.e. 30-100 years) but this has yet to be proven, although I do have some CD-R's that are about 8 years old and still work fine (at least the ones that I stored properly and did not scratch). But other things that come to mind about CD-R's / DVD-R's:
1. Require greater care in handling and storing them, etc.
2. Reports of very short lifespan in some cases, although I suspect that this is more due to poor quality media and/or poor handling and storage practices, etc.

Also, keep in mind that your backup is just that - a backup. Since you'd still have the original CD too, the chances would be pretty low that both your original and your backup would both go bad at the same time. In other words, I don't think it would be necessary to check all your backups on a daily basis to make sure they are all still good. Even PAR files might be a little overkill, although I do love PAR files.

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #17 –
How about getting 2 large hdds and setting up a raid configuration so everything on the main hdd is mirrored onto the second hdd

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #18 –
Hi

Quote
How about getting 2 large hdds and setting up a raid configuration so everything on the main hdd is mirrored onto the second hdd
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=224594"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


Of course that would be an idea, regarding the actual price of mass storage that keeps droping.... As for myself, i'm lucky that my system support RAID directly on-board...
BUT, My idea of backup is to keep FLACs offline (because it eat too much space),  I'll be using either MPC/MP3 for casual listening.  I just recieved my DVD burner bought on e-bay (HP dvd300i).  I'll stick with this solution and PAR2 recovery. (the par2 files will be kept separate from original backup in a situation if "shit hapens" 

@+
be020261

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #19 –
Quote
I think they are talking about something like ISOBUSTER.

And because I was curious, I tried it: Recorded a 16 track album along with 10% par2 redundancy on a CDRW and simulated a media damage (applied a little piece of black tape onto the disc surface). That resulted in 2 unreadable flac files (crc error) and my 10% redundancy weren't sufficient.
Then I used IsoBuster to "extract" the damaged files from the "bad" media (which btw. took ages as it took some 5 seconds to give up on an unreadable sector, and there were many of them...) and saved the incomplete (as there were sectors missing; so I got ~30% of track 1 and ~80% of track 2) flacs along with the good ones on my hdd. And QuickPar now was able to recover all the missing data.
And thus, to get back to the topic: Storing you audio backups on e.g. CDR/DVDR along with 5-10% par2 (may as already suggested on a different medium) gives you a good chance to recover some damaged data. But you need additional software (IsoBuster) to do this. Maybe there's a freeware around that could do that specific task (just collecting all the readable sectors), but imo $30 is a reasonable price if you get back your valuable data...

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #20 –
I work in the storage industry - what you have highlighted is the myth that is now commonplace.

People think storage is cheap, but if you do it properly it can get quite expensive.

My recommendation would be as follows:
1)  keep multiple copies, not including your primary storage - ie your internal hard drive
2)  Use standards where possible - proprietary formats can leave you in deep trouble down the line
3)  Keep off-site copies.  If you are unlucky and get a fire/storm/flood/robbery etc insurance will pay for a new computer but not its data!
4)  'On the cheap' and 'safe storage' are not phrases you can use together
5)  Based on point 4, buy the best media/disks you can afford

Don't worry about media - any replacement for DVD will still probably still read DVD disks and will be much bigger - view it as a 'consolidation opportunity'.

Keep your eye on the technology - if you buy a USB2 external drive and it looks like your next machine won't have it, at least you will have time to act (many MoBos still have serial ports!).

My choice would be an external HDD for ease locally and good quality DVDs for offsite, using standard ISO formats.  DVD's are cheap enough now for you to copy them anyway.  That's what I do with my digital pictures... 

Regards,
Dilldog

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #21 –
Quote
How about getting 2 large hdds and setting up a raid configuration so everything on the main hdd is mirrored onto the second hdd

Raid is an availability enhancer, but not a backup solution.

For instance, what happens when you have a finger slip and delete the "rock" subdirectory on your mirror?  Oops.  What happens when a virus destroys one of the drives?  Oops.

This thread is about backups, and RAID does not do backups.  :-)
------- Rick -------
--------------------

Backup Music (What to Do?)

Reply #22 –
Quote
Quote
How about getting 2 large hdds and setting up a raid configuration so everything on the main hdd is mirrored onto the second hdd

Raid is an availability enhancer, but not a backup solution.

For instance, what happens when you have a finger slip and delete the "rock" subdirectory on your mirror?  Oops.  What happens when a virus destroys one of the drives?  Oops.

This thread is about backups, and RAID does not do backups.  :-)
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=225732"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]


I'll second that.

Someone I know had their machine set on fire recently - RAID didn't help there, either!!!