smnettles Wrote: > 3. On the backup issue, I agree fully that it is required RAID or not. > Not sure how to do it once the collection gets big enough. Maybe I'll > start a new thread and see what other folks are doing. These days, as libraries get larger and larger (you think a 1000 CDs takes up space? Try a couple thousand hours of TV and movie rips...) the only really feasible backup solution is backing up to hard disk.
Once your library becomes larger than can be backed up to a single disk, then you need to start giving it some serious thought, and you'll probably also have to spend some serious money on the solution. With the online SlimServer library itself, you can have individual hard disks with parts of the library. It's not as flexible as having a single contiguous volume to work in, so you have to do something like placing all classical on one drive, all jazz on another, or splittin artists A-M, and N-Z. Then expand on that as your needs move to three or more drives. Like I say, not terribly flexible. IF you fill up the A-M disk and need to add a third disk, splitting it A-G, H-Q, R-Z, you'll find yourself moving a lot of data around. Still, you can easily back this up by having an equal sized backup disk for each main library disk. Using a USB or firewire external drives becomes a LOT less convenient as you move to two or more backup drives, so a dedicated backup machine on your network to house those drives will soon becomes necessary. Both the library and its backup become simpler to manage if you can contain them in a single volume. This is where RAID (RAID5) can become very handy. At the expense of an additional drive, you get your single volume, plus the added convenience of RAID protection. I'm in complete agreement that RAID is unnecessary for either an audio library or its backup. However, it does make things much, much easier to manage. I particularly like this approach for the backup server, as you can build a very large array that can be used to backup your audio library, as well as backing up a video library and PCs on your network. -- JJZolx Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JJZolx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19951 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
