I use robocopy at home and at work a _lot_ for backups, but keep in mind that mirroring is not the same as backing up. Say you screw up and delete an artist's directory containing 15 albums. Oops. If you don't realize this has happened before you mirror the music folder, the mirroring operation will also remove the folders from your so-called backup. The way I get guard against this is to keep rotating backup directories and to keep weekly backups for several weeks, similar to the way you'd rotate tapes in a proper grandfather/father/son backup scheme. But you need sufficient disk space to keep all of the full backups, so this isn't practical for backing up a music library unless you plan on spending a lot on hard drives.
I use DVD-R to backup, but may change to DVD-RW. I'm not certain of the archival quality of DVD-R(W), so I'll test some DVDs in six, nine months, a year, and see if any data becomes unreadable. It's inexpensive and it's easy. Copy 12-16 flac-encoded CDs to a DVD-R, mark it with a number, then log the albums in a text file or spreadsheet. A hundred CDs in a spindle will hold about 1500 albums. Restoring will take a lot longer than from hard disks, but I don't expect that should happen too often (actually, my primary storage is on a RAID 5 array, so I expect to do a full restore from backup only very rarely). The one thing I didn't anticipate with this method, though, is retagging flac files. SlimServer is a constantly shifting target with respect to file tagging (which is both good and bad - it's tough to keep up with how SlimServer uses tags, but it's good that SlimServer is evolving), so I'm running large batch operations on my entire library to add and modify tags. But luckily the encoded music doesn't change, so if I restore from backup then I can run the same batch operations on the restored files to get current tags. -- JJZolx Jim _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
