Article: A Digital Audio Drawback - Music Storage Delicacy, Compatibility, and Longevity

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This is why I stick to streaming.

Just now, Bob2803 said:

This is why I stick to streaming.

Certainly much more convenient :~)

I'm guessing you don't care about the better sounding MoFi, Analogue Productions, Audio Fidelity, etc... versions or the DSD versions?

1 minute ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Certainly much more convenient :~)

 

I'm guessing you don't care about the better sounding MoFi, Analogue Productions, Audio Fidelity, etc... versions or the DSD versions?

Tidal and Qobuz are good enough for me. But, "to each his own".

Any thoughts on whether a 4TB M.2 SSD stick in an enclosure or a same capacity spinning hard drive is more reliable for back-up?

I have just under 2tb of music.  95% Flac file.    I have 4 copies of the entire inventory.   

1 in my music PC via M2 SS drives

1 in a stand alone NAS system

2 via 2tb external hard drives.  These are stored in a Fireproof safe in my home.

I back everything up once a month.

Regards Cazzesman

1GB and 4MB ram? how about 20MB HD and 1MB ram? my Mac SE in 1988(?)

1 hour ago, Mops911 said:

1GB and 4MB ram? how about 20MB HD and 1MB ram? my Mac SE in 1988(?)

I hear ya! That was a little before my time and I didn’t feel right about appropriating it :~)

I make four local backups to external USB drives.  Because I one-way sync so that all the drives are mirrors of the original NAS drive, I run the risk of substituting a bad original for a good one on all of the drives simultaneously, but I found it too hard to manage differing backup protocols on different drives.  Thus far, knock wood, the danger has been more theoretical than actual.  (As we speak, I am creating a mirror on the external USB drive that replaces the one that failed last month, which WD just replaced under warranty.)

I also store a backup in the cloud with iDrive, which sent me a USB drive on to which I loaded my collection initially and that I then returned to the company via snail mail. It took them a couple of days after receiving my files to post them to the web. Once that happened, a scheduler automatically started to back up incrementally overnight.  (Because the iDrive service can’t mirror a mapped drive, there are some differences between the NAS collection and the iDrive one.  Particularly, I have been replacing years of mp3 acquisitions with FLAC files and SD files with HD ones. With iDrive’s inability to sync mapped drives, I then have to delete the old files from iDrive manually if I want to try to have just a mirror. I usually just end up leaving the deleted files on iDrive.)

Like @Jud, I routinely back up to the local USB drives every time I make a change to my collection.  I have lost too much data, musical and otherwise, to faulty media despite my always, always, always running backups, I am a firm believer in total overkill redundancy for any home user and, especially, any business one.  Just because you have a backup, it doesn’t mean that the backup device won’t fail out of the blue or that the device will be able to restore at all even if it purports to be so doing or that the current version of the software will restore the data an older version created.  

Ok, this may be a very stupid question: I easily get the notion of disk failure and the benefit of available/reliable backup to cover for such failure.  But is digital degradation an all or nothing thing?  What happens if you start getting data corruption slowly?  I can more easily see this with a CD or SACD or magnetic tape slowly degrading over time, but a "backup" of a partially degraded magnetic tape will copy the degradation not restore it.  If I maintain a dual NAS and cloud backup and replace my original and NAS disks every say 5 years and count on my cloud service provider to do same and regularly do backups, am I immune or am I still at risk for gradual degradation? 

You bring up one point I never thought about and that's someone injecting ransomware into my NAS. I need to rethink my backup to the cloud schedule now. I may follow you and change that to monthly.

edit: I am a believer in ZFS, coupled with a robust cloud storage provider such as Backblaze.

50 minutes ago, sdolezalek said:

Ok, this may be a very stupid question: I easily get the notion of disk failure and the benefit of available/reliable backup to cover for such failure.  But is digital degradation an all or nothing thing?  What happens if you start getting data corruption slowly?  I can more easily see this with a CD or SACD or magnetic tape slowly degrading over time, but a "backup" of a partially degraded magnetic tape will copy the degradation not restore it.  If I maintain a dual NAS and cloud backup and replace my original and NAS disks every say 5 years and count on my cloud service provider to do same and regularly do backups, am I immune or am I still at risk for gradual degradation? 

This is exactly what ZFS can identify, fix, and alert you to, automatically, so you can replace the bad drive and not lose data.

Very important topic - it's why backups aren't backup-and-forget. Backups need to be tested, both in terms of the data that is stored and also the restoration process.

I thought I was doing things right with my photography backups,  until, this week!  I went looking for some pictures of the Pass Labs Aleph 3 I used to own.  I found my iCloud photos library was missing six days of images from January 2017.  There are 50,000 items in my photo library.  What else is missing?

Oh for the fun.  The amp was one of my favorites a class A 30Wpc amp: 

https://www.stereophile.com/solidpoweramps/674/index.html

I am now fussing hard over my music backup system.

1 minute ago, bobfa said:

I thought I was doing things right with my photography backups,  until, this week!  I went looking for some pictures of the Pass Labs Aleph 3 I used to own.  I found my iCloud photos library was missing six days of images from January 2017.  There are 50,000 items in my photo library.  What else is missing?

 

Oh for the fun.  The amp was one of my favorites a class A 30Wpc amp: 

 

https://www.stereophile.com/solidpoweramps/674/index.html

 

 

 

I am now fussing hard over my music backup system.

 

 

This is exactly what scares me most. When I discovered that the QNAP HBS utility couldn't backup files with quotation marks in the name, I thought, what else can't it backup? I have no clue. Will a software update enabling backing up this stuff or will it accidentally disable backing up of files with other characters in the name? Again, I have no clue.

Then there's the issue like yours, where stuff is just missing. It's easier to compare files when stored in a Folder > File structure, but in a database like iCloud Photos it's impossible. I guess this is another vote for staying away from those other backup apps that store one's files in a database and backup format that can't be inspected by just looking at the files. 

I use iCloud as well and think it's fantastic. There's no way I'm switching away from it for my photos, but for my music, I'm sticking with what I have :~)

I just converted many flacs to AIFF....and, some files are now kaputt...how many? no idea?

I have a copy in e2drive, on a USB drive, and on my two systems (PC with SSD and a NAS). The two NAS were syncing, but I turned that off luckily before converting to AIFF...

The two NAS are in separate states, so syncing 6TB will take time.. ;-) I guess, I will copy all on a new USB drive and manually sync now...

bottom line: so many ways to fail....yeah, technology is great, but comes with a price...
 

6 hours ago, Dan Gravell said:

Very important topic - it's why backups aren't backup-and-forget. Backups need to be tested, both in terms of the data that is stored and also the restoration process.

By chance, could you guide to software that would fit that task?

In my desire for a silent music-video server PC I currently run a Linux OS and have 12tb of internal storage spread across 6 SSD fat formated drives. I have no real use for a networked system so have avoided those complications. All files are stored as either flac or mkv with only few exceptions.

Backup is done manually to an outboard 14tb spinner drive using a rsync terminal command about every 3 months or so. I'm still procrastinating creating some sort of off-site backup in case of catastrophe. My uploading data speed is just too damn slow to mess with, looks like I'll end up with second large spinner drive kept at some friends house or whatever.

Going back to my years passed, I would have never imagined, even just a few short years ago the need for this much storage. But the advent of Atmos coded bluray music discs along with 5.1, etc has spun things out of control and I'm avoiding storage of large video files as much as possible.  😛

Good to shake folks up now and then to remind everyone of what "can" happen.

1 hour ago, DuckToller said:

By chance, could you guide to software that would fit that task?

I don't have any general one-stop answers to that.

For the verification of existing data, it depends on the data. For example, FLACs can be verified using its internal checksum, but even that might not be enough to satisfy some so other comparisons could be made.

For the recovery, this is more of a case of process. You need to know the steps you'll go through to recover the data and then the verification steps to ensure the recovered data is valid (this may use the tools above).