How do you store your film music collection?

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?

at the moment i am using externals, in the long run i want to switch to NAS AND have cloud backup as well.

like always, a matter of financial ressources…

i would be interested in others experienced as well 🙂

i have 2 2tb drives mirrored, and for music only. half full 🙂

with windows you can do raid inside (go to disk management, right click drive 1, convert to dynamic disc, right click drive 2 and convert also to dynamic disc, right click volume\partition on drive 1, add mirror, choose drive 2, and mirror will start setting). that way if needed can you take to another computer with no issues (just re-import dynamic disc and continue filling) and also replace with new hard drive if one die.

cloud provider bitcasa has unlimited space $10 month. not much compared many others…

Hey, thanks for the info. Have just taken a look at the Win 7 internal raid options and you’re right, it is there. Have you got 2x 2TB internal hard drives set up like this then? (thats a lot of music !!)
I think this is a nice, cheaper option and I think I will probably do this, but if money was no object I’d definitely still go for a NAS as it has a dedicated hardware RAID controller, rather than using the operating system. More reliable.
But still, as long as you have primary storage and a backup, you’re protected from disk failure regardless, and that’s the main concern.

Bitcasa looks promising. Do you use/know anyone who uses this?

yes, i have mirrored like this 2 2tb drives. flac from the shrine gives me many happy gb for music 🙂

it does work well, and i have not had problems with any performance. it is same speed copy for to or from drive as others i have in pc.
i did have one drive fail months few ago. replace drive, turn on computer, right click good remained drive, remove mirror. then right click again, add mirror (like at first), and pick new drive. works fast and easy 🙂 works also with hotswap i think if you have this.

advantage with nas is not needing computer on (i have made small low-end server/nas for this reasons), and remote access if supporting this.
one problem exist that sometimes if has hardware (not hard drive) failed you must find identical one to replace, where windows raid allows for any windows computer can import raid drive. plus expensive for me 🙁
one problem with windows raid is it does not inform if a disc fail. so must check disk management couple times for month.

i have bitcasa free account. their software is not good – it will take all upload bandwidth until complete. they are tried "smart" upload to make automatic bandwidth detection, but still is not very good. better would be like jdownloader or utorrent, where you can assign limited upload kb/s or make scheduling.
downloads from there are fast though. with even my slow internet i can stream 720p ok.
they work on making better the software, and it has bettered great in last months. still not good as others though, but price is best!

That’s true, being able to use any drive as a mirror is a big plus. I might get a couple of internal SATA HDs and trial this out. I only have 100GB of music right now so even a pair of mirrored 1TB drives would suffice for a couple of years (I hope). Will still investigate a NAS though – would be nice to know i can set it up and leave it running in the background and not have to worry about losing my stuff! Having to find identical pairs of drives is a pain though 🙁
And as for cloud, if I decide to go that route I will give bitcasa a look. The software may not be the greatest, but there has to be some drawback if you’re only paying $10 p/m.
Thanks for the info, really helpful!