Can anyone give me any tips on dealing with 30k or so worth of songs?
I have a client who has a HUGE CD collection and wants to take the cream
of the crop and put them on a 250gig or 300gig HD for his listening
pleasure.
I only discovered the Squeezebox a few months ago. My boss got one and began raving about it, and it's pretty rare for him to say nice things about *any* product. So I got one (a second is now on order), and it prompted me to get finally serious about the home audio server I've always wanted to build.
I already had a Linux box acting as a server for the house, which I was already planning to expand, so I just added a few more drives. The main Linux file systems reside on a software RAID-1 array of two 250GB IDE drives. I perform monthly backups by the simple expedient of removing one drive every month and replacing it with a new drive or an old recycled backup and letting the mirror rebuild automatically. This gives me a complete bootable backup image of my system for no more downtime than it takes to power down, swap the drives (it's in a removable caddy) and reboot. I *highly* recommend this arrangement for any system that can hold two hard drives. Tape is utterly obsolete as a backup medium, and DVDs are also too slow and small. The only way to back up today's hard drives are onto more hard drives.
Large, relatively static databases like music and personal photo collections reside on six 300 GB SATA drives in a RAID-5 configuration: 4 data drives, 1 parity drive and one online spare. I strongly recommend SATA if you're going to have this many drives in one box, as the cabling would otherwise be a mess. Each drive is split into 50GB partitions, so four data partitions joined in RAID-5 will produce a 200 GB virtual file system. This is a manageable size for rsync backups onto external hard drives that I keep off site or in a safe, as my drive rotation scheme won't work for RAID-5. I currently use two of those 200GB RAID-5 file systems for the slimserver music archive (currently 15,567 songs).
I rip all my CDs in FLAC format and keep them in a storage facility as an off site backup, somewhat less vulnerable to burglary. With hard disks now so roomy and cheap, I saw no reason to use any other format, at least not for my master archive. The extra disk cost was minimal, less than the value of my time ripping all my CDs again. (I'd already ripped many of them before into MP3 or Ogg, and I don't want to ever have to rip them again.) We'll use MP3, Ogg or AAC, produced from the FLAC versions, only for secondary copies in iPods, laptops and car players.
Phil _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
