[Yog Sothoth]

I have started this new thread here, which began in "The Diskless Circle -> Replacing a 2012 Mac Mini" but I felt could warrant its own topic.

Many of us here have large digital music libraries.  When catastrophe strikes and our library is destroyed, how have we ensured that it is recoverable?

I currently have in my house two small servers with 4 data drives each, configured as 4-way RAID mirrors.  Data (not just music) is rsynced nightly between them.  I feel pretty confident in the reliability of my data here, but I would like to incorporate some offsite storage.  I have a couple ideas in mind (buying space from MEGA, placing a spare NUC at a remote location, etc.) But I am curious what others might be doing.

You are making backups, aren't you?

[Doublej]

I backup critical files to a hard drive in the house and also to the OneDrive cloud.

[Yog Sothoth]

I backup critical files to a hard drive in the house and also to the OneDrive cloud.

I calculate about 5 days to transfer all my music across the net.  Not really a big deal since my machines work all through night.  My ISP will ding me for the extra bandwidth for the month; if I time it right I can split it across two billing cycles and avoid being dinged.  It certainly has its appeal.  I can encrypt everything as well (for other, more sensitive data beyond just music).

[I.Greyhound Fan]

I have almost 9tb's of music and use 2x4tb WD Red HD's and an SSD for my favorite music.  It is all backed up on 2x8tb external HD's and a couple of smaller drives.

[Yog Sothoth]

I have almost 9tb's of music and use 2x4tb WD Red HD's and an SSD for my favorite music.  It is all backed up on 2x8tb external HD's and a couple of smaller drives.

Jeebus, that's a lot of data!  Have you thought at all about offsite storage?  I know at some point when my house burns down music won't be my first priority, but it would be at some later point and replacing much of it would prove difficult.

[Yog Sothoth]

I have almost 9tb's of music and use 2x4tb WD Red HD's and an SSD for my favorite music.  It is all backed up on 2x8tb external HD's and a couple of smaller drives.

Do you have automatic migration for you favorite, most played, music from the HD to the SSD?  Or is it a manual process?  I've often considered setting that up.

[MttBsh]

I no longer bother storing music that’s available - and sounds just as good - streaming from Qobuz. I figure going forward more and more music will be available through streaming services so what I store digitally these days is mostly concert recordings I’ve collected over the years and other rare music that would be hard or even impossible to find elsewhere. I store it on a 4 TB SSD.

[NIGHTFALL1970]

I just got a LaCie SSD 2T. I back up with my Apple time capsule.

[I.Greyhound Fan]

Do you have automatic migration for you favorite, most played, music from the HD to the SSD?  Or is it a manual process?  I've often considered setting that up.

I manually do it.  I have 2x1tb SSD's that I can store my favorite music.  I just copy it from the larger drives.  The main SSD is an M.2

[I.Greyhound Fan]

Jeebus, that's a lot of data!  Have you thought at all about offsite storage?  I know at some point when my house burns down music won't be my first priority, but it would be at some later point and replacing much of it would prove difficult.

No I have not but my son has all my music as well.  I do have a fireproof safe in the house that I could use to store the music.

[Yog Sothoth]

No I have not but my son has all my music as well.  I do have a fireproof safe in the house that I could use to store the music.

Ah, excellent!  That sounds like a sound plan, especially having a safe and a like-minded son!

[WGH]

I have almost 9tb's of music...

Large amounts of data can also be backed up to a web hosting company. Register a domain name with GoDaddy and set up personal site at a hosting company like HostPC. Another advantage is you can have a permanent personal email address even if you move to another country.
https://hostpc.com/unlimited-cpanel-web-hosting/

I have an account at HostPC but no web page, I just use the site for hosting RMAF photos because they have unlimited bandwidth.
Their site also says they have unlimited disk space although I doubt they were thinking of 9TB.
$7.95/month for 3 years.

[I.Greyhound Fan]

Large amounts of data can also be backed up to a web hosting company. Register a domain name with GoDaddy and set up personal site at a hosting company like HostPC. Another advantage is you can have a permanent personal email address even if you move to another country.
https://hostpc.com/unlimited-cpanel-web-hosting/

I have an account at HostPC but no web page, I just use the site for hosting RMAF photos because they have unlimited bandwidth.
Their site also says they have unlimited disk space although I doubt they were thinking of 9TB.
$7.95/month for 3 years.

I would consider that if I run out of disk space but physical storage is cheap.  Right now I have triple back up.  Some day, I will go through my collection and delete what I do not listen to.

[Yog Sothoth]

I received an offer from a friend of mine to store my backup NUC at his house; he's interested in my music library so it's a win-win for both of us.  I just need to install an updated OS (xubuntu) and populate the data disk with my music.  Won't cost me a dime extra.

The online solutions are desirable also, but I think this will work well for me.

[sfraser]

I have a TrueNAS  rackmount server (redundant power supplies and a UPS)  with about 12T useable space. The files system is setup across 6 x4TB drive's  and the file system should survive two simultaneous drive failures.  I got about 2.5TB of FLAC files located on the server. It is also the host for a VM running my Logitech Media Server (LMS) which streams music to 8 players through out the house.  I have buried Cat5E cable to my neighbors house, where I located a Raspberry Pi4 with a external drive bay housing two 6T drives. In return my neighbor streams music and movies from server ...good trade both ways. I also have an external USB drive I keep a 2nd backup of my music. This backup prior to COVID was kept at my place of work, I would take it home once a month for updates etc. At this point I have mostly raspberry Pi's with HiFIberry DAC's as my music streamers (home made squeezebox's) running MAX2PLAY image. I have set one player with a backup LMS server. The server is pointing towards my backup files at my neighbors. If I lose my TrueNAS server for any reason, I can enable the backup LMS and do a rescan of the music and carry on!

[mgalusha]

I'm similarly configured, truenas server with 8x8g drives, dual supplies, big ups. It backs up to a qnap nas that is running roon sever. Assorted roon end points on SBC's, two intel atoms, two nucs, a pi, assorted desktops. All the non desktop machines run dietpi linux, works well for me.

There is also a back up of the above to a 4 bay USB drive, just in case...

I have a TrueNAS  rackmount server (redundant power supplies and a UPS)  with about 12T useable space. The files system is setup across 6 x4TB drive's  and the file system should survive two simultaneous drive failures.  I got about 2.5TB of FLAC files located on the server. It is also the host for a VM running my Logitech Media Server (LMS) which streams music to 8 players through out the house.  I have buried Cat5E cable to my neighbors house, where I located a Raspberry Pi4 with a external drive bay housing two 6T drives. In return my neighbor streams music and movies from server ...good trade both ways. I also have an external USB drive I keep a 2nd backup of my music. This backup prior to COVID was kept at my place of work, I would take it home once a month for updates etc. At this point I have mostly raspberry Pi's with HiFIberry DAC's as my music streamers (home made squeezebox's) running MAX2PLAY image. I have set one player with a backup LMS server. The server is pointing towards my backup files at my neighbors. If I lose my TrueNAS server for any reason, I can enable the backup LMS and do a rescan of the music and carry on!

[geowak]

That's a great question. In the world of digital streaming we still find ourselves (many of us) wanting to have our OWN music media. I had many CD's ripped to my hard drive stored in iTunes and I decided to buy a Bluesound Vault and transfer all those hundreds of CDs to the Vault. I also have three old school mega Sony CD changers that I have many of my CDs stored in and can catalog and play if I want. It's a lot of work just to have your OWN music media. Streaming is really very good and not time consuming.

Also I have two dedicated high end CD players and DAC for critical listening.... and two Bluesound players. Not to start any fights here, but I find MQA music files sound very good to me.

[mcgsxr]

4TB of tunes here.

1 backup in the house.  1 backup "offsite" (brother lives in town).

I don't make many changes to the collection anymore, so I have not backed anything up in years, but the 2 backups are still there in case.

[Housteau]

I like using a networked type of server based on a simple Mac Mini.  This allows manipulation of the HD's for onsite backup as well as inexpensive automatic online backup using Backblaze.  The Mac also holds Roon core and HQPlayer.  There is no issue with degraded sonics using the Mini since it is network isolated.  The sound quality is controlled by my streamer and connection to the dac.

[Yog Sothoth]

I have started this new thread here, which began in "The Diskless Circle -> Replacing a 2012 Mac Mini" but I felt could warrant its own topic.

Many of us here have large digital music libraries.  When catastrophe strikes and our library is destroyed, how have we ensured that it is recoverable?

I currently have in my house two small servers with 4 data drives each, configured as 4-way RAID mirrors.  Data (not just music) is rsynced nightly between them.  I feel pretty confident in the reliability of my data here, but I would like to incorporate some offsite storage.  I have a couple ideas in mind (buying space from MEGA, placing a spare NUC at a remote location, etc.) But I am curious what others might be doing.

You are making backups, aren't you?

Thanks to everyone here for your great responses!  It warms my cockles to hear that most people have some sort of backups, even if only onsite.

I have completed my project for offsite backups.

I had a spare Zotac Zbox (similar to a NUC), populated it with new storage, copied my library over, and then moved the device to a friend's house who was nice enough to offer to house it.  I poked a hole in his router's firewall to open port 22 (ssh) and forwarded that port's traffic to my Zbox and assigned the Xbox a static address.

From home I run nightly rsyncs between my music library at home to the Zbox at his house.  It's been working great!  Running samba on the Zbox gives the added benefit of making all my music available to my friend as a Windows share.

I have left out all the technical details of setting it up, but if anyone is interested I would be happy to provide as much information as you'd like.  It's actually pretty easy for anyone who might have similar thoughts.