Backing Up Your Backup's Backups

Back in my high school radio days, I remember hanging out at the station with a few of my classmates and one of them (a guy who visits here once in a while) expressed how he was upset with one of our fellow station employees for something.  He said he was going to get back at him by erasing all his LPs.  We all laughed at him as it's impossible to 'erase' LPs.  Now audio tape is a different matter, we had a bulk tape eraser at the station, all stations have them.  Anything on a cassette, reel-to-reel tape, cart or videotape is erasable, LPs and CDs aren't.  Which brings me to the present day.

We're becoming a culture of data storage, a lot of us aren't even retaining the original medium fromwhich we obtained the data.  I hear all the time of people ripping their music collections onto their hard drives and then selling their CDs.  Of course, technically, that in of itself is illegal as you can only legally have that data on your drive if you own the source material.  Then again, entire networks are built upon the idea of 'trading' music illegally, so I doubt many are losing sleep over a technicality.  What scares me isn't the legality of it so much as the very real possibility of that data on your hard drive itself getting erased, lost, destroyed or stolen. 

A lot of us have taken the prudent step of buying external hard drives and backing up our precious data/music on those drives. Problem is, a lot of those drives are sitting there backing up this data right next to the computer where the originals are kept.  Now if the computer crashes, we're likely fine, the external drive can be called upon to retrieve the lost data.  But what if, say, a thief, a fire, flood or some other catastrophe befalls our data and the data on the drive right next to it?  Most of us are screwed, no?  Especially the poor soul who unloaded his or her source material after ripping it.  That's the fatal flaw of digital data storage these days, it may be convenient to have the equivalent of thousands of CDs or LPs on one's hard drive but like all magnetically stored data, it's inherently vulnerable to loss.  Not just loss by theft or destruction but also accidental erasure.  Who among us hasn't accidentally deleted a file? Imagine your entire hard drive.

I wonder what your backup plan is? I know people with backup external hard drives kept in separate locations that they then update regularly or swap out their drives periodically. Call me paranoid but I'm not ready to unload anything until someone can assure me that what I have stored digitally is retrievable and I have adequate backups.  And make sure my backups have backups.

Comments

[Jeff]

I suggest that you either email everything small through hotmail or gmail (it will never be deleted) and for your music collection sign up for an internet service like Mozy.

The cost of high-qualify offsite storage is very low now ($5 a month, unlimited space) and you could never reproduce what they can offer at home.

[drcastrato]

I was just thinking about this same topic. I received a small fire-proof safe as a Christmas gift, to store "important documents" or whatever. But it got me thinking about protecting important data (and what's more inportant than music?) and I suddenly realized that my hard drive, backup hard drive and all my physical CDs are ALL IN THE SAME ROOM. Wow, kind of stupid. I like the idea of online storage. I'm going to look into that.

[Mike]

I have my entire music collection (~1800 CDs + thousands of MP3s from eMusic/Amazon/etc) saved to 3 hard drives and 2 sets of DVDs. 1 hard drive and 1/2 of the DVDs are kept at work.

[Perry/Chicago]

I am backup obsessed.
Since my soon to be secondary computer has a small HD, I have relied on many external HDs as extensions of the main computer. What people in my predicament constantly forget is backup of those external drives. For every external you buy at Costco, if it's for any kind of extension, buy two. You must backup every external with another one.
I am baffled by people who have every digital picture they have ever taken on a single computer. Pictures of irreplaceable things like pics of their kids growing up. Insane!
You can always go out and pick up another copy of Exile On Main Street but you are never going to replace one of a kind keepsakes.
And the solution on my new MacPro is 8TB of RAID striped HDs on the Mac and an 8TB RAID striped rack mounted backup that is auto backed up.
I'm still trying to figure out the fire solution, but at least I hope it's above flood level at 4'. And I'd like to think Paulie will keep the thieves away from the rack . . .

Perry/Chicago

[Jeff]

heh 8TB, RAID striped HDs, etc. etc. - I was wrong. You probably can replicate Mozy at home with enough effort!

[Andy]

Like Jeff does, I keep my backup hard-drive in a "fireproof" safe to protect against theft and/or damage. I assume this will keep my data safe, but at the very least it helps me sleep soundly at night knowing that I've done my best to protect my backups. Oh, and I do have original copies of all my music, which I still sometimes "spin" in my 300 CD changer, which became obsolete the day after I bought it.