Digital Stream, Is it to soon to make the switch??

Of course you need to backup. I would recommend that you store your music on a RAID 1 (mirror) array and have a separate hard drive that you perform backups to every couple of weeks.

I'm currently ripping my CD collection to external 1TB drive. I'm planning to get second identical drive for backup and keep it at work (in case of theft, fire etc.) External drives are cheap now - i paid less than $100 for 1TB Fantom Drive (metal case, quiet)

If you use an application designed to do backups the only time doing it is a pain is the first time you back up a really large drive full of music, and that's only because it takes a very long time and you'll get tired of checking to see whether it's done.

After that, any good backup program will make incremental backups, copying only what's new and deleting anything you've put in the trash.

Just fire up the drives once a week, launch the backup application and you'll never lose more than a week's worth of ripping. I do it every Saturday morning when I get up and check my mail. It seldom takes more than 15 minutes and I don't have to do anything after it starts.

Try this perspective - at least with a hard drive system you can easily make a backup copy.

You can do that with CDs, but it is a lot more time and work plus more storage space.

As for vinyl, what's the game plan if you have a fire at your home or burglars steal or vandalize your collection? I've had more than one friend who has lost a significant number of LPs stored in their basement from sewer backup.

I keep two backups of the music on my server. I keep one in a different room at home and another off-premises. If I somehow lose all three at once I figure I've got bigger problems in my life to deal with.

hello all

Hey thanx for the great info. Let me start by saying if i have a fire and loose my lp's then i supose it would be very disheartening to say the least, however i think the odds of a fire in my house is very remote!

I guess this is not as complicated as i thought! I guess i will do just that...ill back every thing up into an additional harddrive. I will aquire 2 storage devices--1 for music access and one for the purpose of back up only. I have never been a huge fan of the cd, so this move forward comes as an exciting venture here. I was very taken back by the replay of Linns DS units.

And just for the record!, nobody would get out my house with my records in hand if i was home...they would not make it out alive! Thank you all for the clarification, its been a big help.. Sincerely Jeremy P

Not to belabor the point too much, but things do happen. In looking at insurance claim statistics, there were over 400,000 house fires in 2008. Over the past 10 years, the average number of flood claims from outside water sources has been over 50,000 a year. Wind damage, theft and interior water damage claims (frozen or burst pipes, etc.) are also each in the hundreds of thousands per year.

So make sure you have a backup that is away from your premises. If you do have a big loss at your home you'll have a lot of other stuff to worry about initially, but at some point down the road it'll be a lot faster and easier to copy the off-premises backup to a new server than to rebuild your collection from scratch.

Banks, insurance companies and a host of other businesses keep a large percentage of their vital data on hard drives. The secret is backups at different locations.

Mlsstl - I can understand huge number of fire insurance claims but how one makes flood?

How to make a flood?

Not too hard to get flooded. The house can be too close to a river or other body of water or you can have a accumulation of surface waters from a heavy rain. Google "downtown houston floods" for some pictures of a major metropolitan downtown area under water.

Mlsstl - that was a joke

- that was a joke.

Thanks for the clarification. Sometimes it's hard to tell.

There is a lot of software that will manage the entire back-up process for you. Schedule a time and day and as long as everything is on, it will all be over in the morning...

It is preferable to use software that checks the bits as it duplicates rather then just doing a drag n drop.

I am a Mac guy - if you are check out ChronoSync or CarbonCopy Clone which is donation-ware.