Cloud storage for 8TB of music files on an external HD

@kennyc 

I understand the dilemma. Absolutely skip ripping and saving. It’s incredibly time-consuming. I got rid of my CDs. They’re just taking them space and collecting dust.. That day is gone by. I ripped all my CDs over the last 20 years.  I never listened to them now, no reason to go there.

Quboz has half a million albums at high resolution albums.

Most of my high resolution discs are audiophile vinyl pressing. I find it in general.no sonic advantage of Audiophile pressing over what I end up finding on Quboz. I’ll play an Audiophile vinyl album and think OK. This can’t be that good on streaming. I pull up. The streaming version turns out it’s high definition version and sounds as good or better.

I have been a Microsoft user and advocate for most of my career. Apple was always a pain in the butt, however, Apple has changed the world has changed. Over the last few years I even offered apples to executives as opposed to Microsoft PCs.

I slowly move to the iPhone and then iPads as the came out which I use constantly and then the MacBook Pro. It is just simply stunning. I am now retired and I finally just got sick of Microsoft's constant upgrades in failure for communication software to work across platforms like email and messaging. They just.never worked when I needed them. Last year I finally moved from the PC to the over to a Mac studio. So my house now is 100% apple.

I absolutely love it. I can receive calls and messages on my MacBook or my office MAC PC. I use it right now when I’m sitting in front of the fire, I can’t advocate more. All the photos I take are  quickly available from every one of my devices so if I take a bunch of pictures, I come into the house they're on my MacBook or in my office computer. I can modify them then send them along if I wanted to give them away.

There’s a learning curve of course when you go from a PC to a Mac. Same concepts, different ways of getting into things Mac is easier to learn if you don’t know computers, but it’s a little frustrating when you go trying to find something until you get used to it. My life is so much easier with Apple I would never consider going back.

My attitude towards the cloud and personal data is fairly relaxed. First of all, one are so much more secure in an Apple environment than in a google environment (browsing / phone). It’s not funny. I am boring.  if you want to be somewhat secure, you need to be in an all Apple environment. Unless you are completely in a corporate secured Microsoft environment… and very few people are. Virtually anything you do in Google messaging emails all that stuff gets read and forward to databases some of it in summary form some of it specifically.

I was at Harvard for a seminar in 1989. They were demonstrating the advantage of UNIX. They asked one of the participants what their name was and their address from that within 15 seconds they told the group his phone numbers how much he owed on his house, where he worked, who his neighbors were,  how much they owed on their houses. Are you aWhat their cars were, their loan values. This was all available online in 1989 and the databases that are currently available on all your purchases and preferences are incredible so what are you hiding?  You certainly wanna make sure that any brokerage accounts and bank account accounts are very secure, use the double authentication always check your emails for unauthorized withdrawals. But other than that who cares if you got recipes from aunt Jane and why would they hack it?

Also, the thing you most have to worry about is what doje just did. By connecting the five governmental databases. They now know everything from what benefits you receive and have ever received, where you work,  how much money you make, what your party affiliations,  comments you made in Facebook or messages you sent to friends. There are no secrets. Within a few minutes, I could take that data and make a prioritize list by partee affiliation, what you’ve said on-line anywhere, where you live, how much you make, your health problems, etc. and do bad things with it.  I am a boring retired person so I suspect nobody cares.

Now, if one wants to be real OCD an offsite backup is needed. Having multiple copies in the same location means they all are gone if a fire, etc occurs. Find a trusted friend/neighbor with a safe. Make a set of backups and ask them to keep in their safe.

I backed up my website, code and database to a couple of thumb drives. Since by 2 friends are gun guys they have safes. They now each have a thumbdrive.

3 levels of storage. Son is working copy. Father is backup. Grandfather is offsite.

[[a reliable SSD for a somewhat similar price so why would I pay $48 a month forever]]

Just be sure to park your backup drive some other location than where the "live" data lives.  Otherwise a fire, flood, even electrical anomaly (if the backup drive is connected) could easily wipe out both the live data and the "backup".

I agree with most of what ghdprentice says.  Some of the other responses I have some concerns with.  I'm a former software engineer who enjoys commercial-grade computer systems in his house, and I have a hobby in collecting electronic data (including digital audio).

I use Backblaze's various service for my home computers.  I use their unlimited data services (which is about $90/yr for a 2-year plan, or under $8/month).  This is what you likely want for your situation.  It works fine, and with a check of a box in the settings app you can choose any external hard drives to back up.  I back up a similar amount of data on my Mac with digital photography files on an external 8TB SSD.  I'm not sure where you're getting $48/month, and where you see that it doesn't back up external drives.  I've been a loyal customer of Backblaze for several years now and haven't encountered a single hiccup with them.

I also make use of Backblaze's B2 service, which allows you to use the cloud storage space as your see fit, with my Linux server.  I use Duplicacy as my backup software to Backblaze B2, but there are a number of choices (Restic, etc).  With this you can choose your own encryption key, so even the most paranoid about computer security can relax here, as the data is stored in a fully encrypted state.  The pricing for this is more complex, and is related to the number of transactions and the amount of storage used.

A few comments relating to some of the answers above:

* Local and off-site backups are a must.  (Cloud storage counts as off-site.) I keep backup hard drives at my office at work, so a house fire/flood/theft/etc can be restored quickly with the drives in the office.  I rotate 3 different backup drives so that two are at my house and one is at the office.  I also have Backblaze for my cloud backups, and my partial restore tests have been completely successful.

* If you're going to store data at a friend's house, safe deposit box, etc use a hard drive (not SSD).  SSD's/thumb drives don't hold data without being powered on periodically as well as HDD's, as ghdprentice mentions.  After 6 months or so the probability of a solid state device having perfect data retention starts to drop.  Besides, HDD's are cheaper on a per-TB basis.

* Someone mentioned RAID as a backup.  RAID is not a backup.  It is a mechanism for allowing large amounts of storage and the ability to tolerate the loss of of one drive (RAID5) or two drives (RAID6).  It does not protect against accidental deletion, malware, etc.

* Honestly, if I were starting this hobby right now I would probably subscribe to a couple streaming services and call it a day.  That said, I enjoy the concept of owning the data, and I do well at managing it, so having Roon play things that I want to focus on is really neat.  Of course, if we've made investments in CD's, SACD's, and digital downloads for decades and have spent a lot of time and effort organizing them into our digital collection, then there's a valid argument to just continue it.

Hang in there, and spend the effort to safeguard your data.  Data storage has never been faster or cheaper, so take advantage of the exponential improvements over the past few decades.  

Michael