I Tunes Backup


After loading about 500 CD'S I started to think about a way to back up My music. I have my music on a external hard drive now, [ a Mac Mini system ] I see most of you have either a second hard drive or a raid system for backup . I also thought about that way to go but went another way and picked up a external DVD burner and make backup DVD duel layer disk's . I think this is a little simpler for me to do than set up a raid system i know it may be a pain to load all the data back on to a new hard disk when it fails but. I want to know if anybody else is doing this or do you just have several hard drives or a raid set up. Any thoughts on backing up your music for now I own all the CD'S I ripped to the hard drive but that may change [ download , library , friends CD'S ] thanks for your thoughts Marc
lake513

Showing 1 response by sfar

Backing up to double-layer DVD's is certainly better than having no backup but it's a fair amount of work to burn the discs, keep them organized and to restore them if you have to do that. If you're going to do it that way I'd suggest you make two complete sets and keep one offsite.

As Kennyt says, hard drives are really cheap now, I've seen 1TB drives for even less, around $125, and you don't need to go to the trouble of setting up a RAID array to have an effective backup.

I have an external drive of the same capacity as the one that holds my music and use the application 'SuperDuper' to clone my regular hard drive by plugging in the external one every weekend and doing an incremental backup. After the initial copying of the drive it takes only 10 or 15 minutes, depending on how much music I've added over the week. There's always the risk of losing one week's worth of music but redoing that amount of work isn't very scary. I'm paranoid enough that if I leave town for a few days I put the external drive into a fire-proof safe in my basement.