danhalluk
06-27-2013, 09:39 AM
My film score collection is ever expanding, and now the storage partition on my primary hard drive is 'in the red' for capacity and I need to look for other solutions. If my HD failed and I lost all this music, I think I would just give up at life. It's time to spend some money, so which storage/backup method is the best for ensuring I've got all of this music in many years to come?
What do you folks use and what would you suggest?
To run through what I know about the various options:
There's the obvious external hard drive, and while thats a good short term backup, external HDDs usually contain the same 'physical' drives as an internal HD, so are prone to mechanical failure. Still, they're fairly cheap.
I've heard of collectors burning their vast collections to hundreds of DVD disks. Time consuming, but perhaps a bit more reliable. The problem being disks can be scratched, and believe it or not the data does degrade on them over extended periods of time (we're probably looking at decades though). There are Bluray disks too, but supposedly the data on these degrades quicker due to a much higher level of data to disk surface ratio.
There's the newer SSD hard drives, which are basically huge flash memory sticks. No physical parts to damage by dropping or extended use. Problem is they're never going to be 100% failproof, and they're pretty pricey at the moment, especially for the higher volume drives.
Theres always a NAS server, which can come in any variety of sizes/setups. NAS servers allow RAID configurations - for those that don't know, RAID allows a drive mirroring feature, meaning 50% of your drives mirror the other 50%. If any single drive fails, there's always another to recover it from. Plus NAS servers allow instant sharing of your files across your household and even the web.
Although it puts the safety of my music in someone else's hands, theres cloud storage to consider. The problem being that my collection is creeping up on the 100GB mark (probably insignificant compared to some, I know) and there aren't many reasonably priced cloud packages that allow that much data. Plus it restricts room for expansion, and I dread to think what initial upload time would be like.
What would you recommend. Are there any I've missed?
What do you folks use and what would you suggest?
To run through what I know about the various options:
There's the obvious external hard drive, and while thats a good short term backup, external HDDs usually contain the same 'physical' drives as an internal HD, so are prone to mechanical failure. Still, they're fairly cheap.
I've heard of collectors burning their vast collections to hundreds of DVD disks. Time consuming, but perhaps a bit more reliable. The problem being disks can be scratched, and believe it or not the data does degrade on them over extended periods of time (we're probably looking at decades though). There are Bluray disks too, but supposedly the data on these degrades quicker due to a much higher level of data to disk surface ratio.
There's the newer SSD hard drives, which are basically huge flash memory sticks. No physical parts to damage by dropping or extended use. Problem is they're never going to be 100% failproof, and they're pretty pricey at the moment, especially for the higher volume drives.
Theres always a NAS server, which can come in any variety of sizes/setups. NAS servers allow RAID configurations - for those that don't know, RAID allows a drive mirroring feature, meaning 50% of your drives mirror the other 50%. If any single drive fails, there's always another to recover it from. Plus NAS servers allow instant sharing of your files across your household and even the web.
Although it puts the safety of my music in someone else's hands, theres cloud storage to consider. The problem being that my collection is creeping up on the 100GB mark (probably insignificant compared to some, I know) and there aren't many reasonably priced cloud packages that allow that much data. Plus it restricts room for expansion, and I dread to think what initial upload time would be like.
What would you recommend. Are there any I've missed?