Hello everyone. I've been reading everything I can find about hardware, file compression, software, etc and I'm left with several decisions that are too vital for me to make on my own.

I've tried and failed to archive my beloved CD collection. I bought an external USB 2.0 Western Digital 300GB HDD last year and started putting all my music on it in MP3 format (LAME VBR 192k-320k).

That hard disk just died, and I'm back to square one. I've decided not to put all my eggs in one basket, so I'll be burning files onto Taiyo Yuden CDRs *and* Verbatim DVD+Rs instead. After finding and reading through this site, I'm not sure what format to make back-ups in. MP3 is not as efficient as FLAC, but my primary concern is: will these back-ups be universally playable 5-10 years from now? MP3 may be less efficient, but there is a ton of software and hardware to support it, but the same is not true for FLAC.

I'm almost to the point of just making CDDA copies of everything I have--1 CDR per 1 music CD. It seems like that's the only format that may be of any use years from now, with so much variance in standards. Plus I am worried that a few years from now, "they" will take away our ability to rip and encode our own CDs and make all older audio formats unplayable.

So I am here asking for advice as my last attempt at finding a sane solution. For how long can I rely on the FLAC format? Is MP3 a safer bet even though it's not as good? Are the CDR and DVD+R combinations a good idea? Or should I try an internal HDD this time? (I have a SATA mobo). Thanks in advance.

-deadmuse

Try searching this forum. You'll get much more info than relying on some folks who bother to reply to such a frequent question. Trust me you will learn less this way.


Triza

My first suggestion would be to try and recover the hard drive yourself. Most times hard drives failures aren't where they can't be powered up again, its where data has been lost or corrupted. But alas, the data is almost always there, somewhere, in some form, you just arent seeing it. Usually 60-100% of that data can be recovered (I've always found it closer to 95-98%) using a recovery program like OnTrack EasyRecovery Pro (under Advanced Recovery). It's not a for sure thing but worth a try.

AS for re-rippping your collection, many factors come into play. How big is it, how big will it get & how many hard drives are you willing to buy to store it all, how much compatibility do you need? My situation sucks because I'm a dj and have thousands of CD's. No DJ software supports much more than mp3 or ogg. And space obviously becomes an issue as i would love to rip to Wavpack or FLAC, but its not realistic yet. For me, if I could pick any format it would be MPC, we all know how transparent it can be at small filesizes with a short encode time. But nothing hardware wise is compatible to MPC......yet, if ever. If you only need basic PC compatibility (winamp, foobar,etc) and storage size is an issue, then I would go with MPC. Always a decent option is Lame MP3 (3.90.3 aps/ape) (and now 3.97b1 -V 0 or 1 which actually sounds real good so far). Also, OGG aoTuVb4 (v 1.1.1) is worth checking out. And MP3 will always be the most compatible.

I wouldn't worry so much about burning to both CD-R & DVD-R, thats a little ridiculous. DVD+-R should be just fine.

I also wouldn't worry about FLAC or WAVPACK as they will be around & supported for some time. At the current rate I really see WAVPACK becoming as dominant (maybe not in hardware players) as FLAC in usage, or more. Definitely consider it, and the fact that it is developer is so committed to it. Of course LPAC & Monkeys Audio are other options.

The mumbo jumbo about taking away our abilities to do basic tasks we want to do on our PC's, it's rubbish, NEVER HAPPEN., forget about it.

Ideally I would say just rip 10-15 albums & encode the wav's to lossless (FLAC or WAVPACK), then burn a lossless DVD full. Using the ripped wav's again, encode to your lossy format of choice. Then just create a spreadsheet document with a column for dvd disc # (001) and album title (Van Halen - Van Halen) and if you ever need to look stuff up quick there ya go. The nice thing about ripping to lossless is as long as the dvd's you store stuff on don't get corrupt you won't have to rip your collection again, just plop in a disc and transcode from lossless to your favorite lossy format.

Just my thoughts, good luck with everything.

edited to remove my forward statement upon ogg vorbis, i wasn't aware of the more strict terms of service as i haven't been so active in posting here for a while now.

One other suggestion... buy a big external hard drive to use as backup. This is waht I've done instead of backing up on discs - I just sync my mp3 folders on my main hard drive with the external every so often. Usually I store the external drive somewhere away from my computer, so if for some reason my computer dies in an explosion, I'll have the data elsewhere

There are many factors to consider, but don't forget the quality of the optical blanks, if you decide to backup onto DVD, or any other removable media. Somewhat over three years ago, not so very long ago I would say, I purchased a Plextor CD writer from my local computer shop. I also bought one package of the only CD-R blanks they had in stock (PNY brand).

A little later I started transferring LPs to CD. After cleaning up, I wrote to audio CD-R and also backed up as data on another CD-R (in .ape format, to save space). Today I wanted to make a copy of an album I finished on 10-02-02. Starting with the data version is my approach of choice. Unfortunately the PNY CD-R was no longer readable. It has been stored in a CD binder since its creation, so there was no opportunity for evil forces to get at it, just the entropy of our universe.

By the time I started doing the LP transfers I knew a little bit more about the subject and had purchased better quality blanks for my audio CDs. For this album, all tracks extracted without problem, so I haven't lost anything, but I could have if I had depended only upon lesser disks. I've been using TaiyoYuden for all my backup since a little after the time of that bad disk, and Mitsui (now MAM-A) for the audio CDs. So far there have been no failures with these.

I've also had pretty good luck recovering most of the data from a couple of IBM Desk Star hard drives that failed. I certainly would not give up on your audio collection without a fight.

My music server has two 160 GB Samsung drives and one of them is purely for backups. Unfortunately my backup method is very rough - just a manual copying of new rips to the other partition which can be written or erased only with the admin account which I don't usually use. I should find a nice Raid-1 solution or something. One possible problem is that the discs are in the same box, one day I'll use an external firewire or usb hard disc for backups.

EDIT: I guess my message is that hard disc is relatively cheap and I'd use hd backups if I were you. And whatever you do, backing up is essential and one hd can fail any second - rarely two at the same time.

Thanks for the suggestions so far.

onthejazz:
I'm a DJ as well, so I have the same dilemma. I have about 1500 CDs to back up, and being as picky as I am, MP3 192 is not good enough for me. I've had the hard disk looked at and apparently it's so dead they told me not to bother paying them to even try.

AndyH-ha:
I'm planning to redo all my backups and use only Taiyo Yuden CDRs. I have Verbatim DVD+Rs, but perhaps I should try to get TY DVDRs as well. Thanks for you suggestions.

emr:
Sadly I cannot seem to find SATA hard drives at a cheap price, not in the 200gb range anyway. Does anyone know why the SATA drives are comparatively rare? I thought they were going to be the new standard.

timcupery:
I've got so much data to back up that I'm wary of trying another external. If I can find one with a good rebate offer, I may get it just as yet another backup source.

Thanks again to everyone for their helpful suggestions. I've learned a lot since finding this website.

First you have to define what is your goal. From your first post I assume you want to archive/backup your collection.

For that I would simply copy the CDs without going through the hassle of the rip/encoding/tagging/burning process. It would be WAY faster and the goal would still be achieved.

1. Can you provide so many samples on which Ogg Vorbis q7 is not transparent to you while MP3 and MPC perform well? TOS #8 violation?
2. And what about this thread:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=36465

beto:
Yes, my goal is to make an archive/ backup without using up too much storage space. I did a test run with FLAC, and so far I am saving a bit under 30% of the space. You're right, for the time and payof, making CDDA copies would be a simpler solution, especially when you consider the extra work of decoing FLAC or MP3. Having archive copies that are directly playable themselves is a bonus for me.

Honestly, it took me an hour to figure out how the FLAC encoding worked using the pinned instructions in the lossless forum, so perhaps I am also missing the entire point of why people make FLAC copies if they are not directly playable and only compress WAV by 30% or so.

So here is my current plan:
1. Direct CDDA backups of my favorite 750 CDs on Taiyo Yuden CDRs.
2. WAV file backups of my entire collection of ~1500 CDS onto 200 DVDs.
3. MP3 file backups of my entire collection of ~1500 CDS onto 30 DVDs.

If one copy goes bad, I have 2 more copies plus the originals. That should last a while I suppose.

might as well store wavepacks or flacs instead of waves (on the dvds).. or rar each album, for all it's worth; also keep the command-line extractor (or its source) on each dvd, just in hypothetical case it gets obsoleted...

It's more than 15'000-20'000$

Media: My proposal is to go with TWO external HDDs. HDD1 should not be constantly connected but only for syncing. HDD2 should even less often be connect and just be a mirror of HDD1.

Store them safely. That way, the risk of disaster should be much lower than with optical media. If in some case HDD1 bites the dust DONT rush to connect HDD2. Instead, first investigate why HDD1 died(so, that in case it was caused by the PC, it will not kill HDD2 as well). Afterwards, buy a replacement HDD1. THEN connect both HDDs and immediatelly copy HDD2 to the new replacement HDD1. Always try to minimize the time when both HDDs are connected simultaneusly.

Format:
FLAC if you have enough space, WavPack Lossy at around 400kbit if space is an issue, and Vorbis if you're really cheap. The reason why WavPack Lossy is preferable over Vorbis is because WavPack is better to transcode from.

- Lyx

How exactly do you "simply copy" a CD-DA without going through the ripping and burning steps?

IMHO, it's clear that for backup purposes you want to save the ripped CD in data format because 1) you don't need to deal with ripping again, and 2) [data CDs | DVDs | hard drives] have much better error-correction than CD-DA. In return, you lose the ability to directly play the backups, but since I'm one of those people who almost never listens to a CD in a CD player, I've never much cared about this. YMMV.


Back when I was backing up my CDs 1-1 onto data CD-Rs, I usually burned the WAV files. But for a small fraction of my collection, the WAV files wouldn't fit on a data CD. Being ~30% smaller, the FLAC files always fit.

For more typical backup schemes, the FLAC files require 30% (or in the case of my music collection, 35%) fewer DVDs or fit on a somewhat smaller hard drive, both of which still represent non-negligible amounts of money. In my case, I currently have 143GB of FLACs, compressed from 222GB of WAVs. Until I upgraded from a 160GB drive to a 250GB drive last month, that 35% was critical. And it soon will be again, once I get around to ripping the rest of my collection. I suspect that in another year or so it will be cheap enough to buy an even bigger drive and dispense with lossless compression for my online collection, though I'll probably still be compressing my backups for a while.

If I were you, I'd store FLACs on those DVD-Rs. However, it sounds like you've come up with a plan that's going to work for you, and that's the important thing.

--John

FLAC is directly playable in most media players. You may have a harder time if you use the FLAC disk image. But if you rip to single tracks it will be as easy as MP3. Just go to my guide in my signature.

I don't know if this 30% figure with flac is typical or not but it averages around 50% savings with Monkey's Audio and is sometimes significantly better. There are Monkey's pluggins, DLLs, whatever works, for a number of software players.

I've been backing up that way for several years without any problems. I always add the 3MB Monkey's install file to the CD-R to increase the possibility of future success.

You don't. What I meant is that all the process in sequence is not necessary for his goal.