First off, I don't think there are necessarily any easy solutions to this unless you have a relatively small library. I'll deal with small and larger libraries separately because I think they warrant different approaches.
*Small libraries* If your library fits on a single drive I'd simply make a 1:1 copy to a second drive that is hosted externally from your PC and only accessed for the purposes of making/ restoring a backup. There are various tools that can automate this and use compare files or rely on date/timestamps/archive attribute etc. If you're really paranoid, make two copies on two external drives. *Larger libraries* This is where things begin to get a little more complex and/ or expensive depending on your approach and appetite for spending. In general, I would suggest the easiest way of dealing with a large library that spans say a Terabyte, is to have an external RAID enclosure that serves the same purpose I discussed above for small libraries. For the really paranoid this approach can be further augmented by the addition of a tape-based backup solution, ideally LTO2 or LTO3 - but this is where things take an expensive turn. My FLAC library is housed on a NAS and duplicated to an external RAID5 enclosure that is only powered up for the purposes of backup - yep, it's not automated, but the fact is my library is not that dynamic either. The RAID enclosure is in turn backed up to LTO2 tape using an incremental backup strategy. If I was to do this again I might consider backing up to another external RAID enclosure rather than to tape - it would be a lot faster. The advantage of tape over DASD is that it can grow with your needs whereas you could conceivably outgrow a RAID configuration and expanding a RAID array is not a risk free exercise in and of itself. *An alternative approach - separate metadata from audio* Whilst I can't point to a tool that can do this I remember reading somewhere (in this forum I believe) of an approach that involved separating backup of metadata from the actual audio, with the underlying thinking being that the audio stream seldom changes whereas the associated metadata is often times updated, augmented etc. This would in my view be an ideal approach insofar as my incremental backups would shrink tremendously in size. *Conclusion* There are as many backup strategies and tools out there as you can poke a stick at - all of which will generally culminate in disk or tape backup, or perhaps even blu-ray in time. The important thing, irrespective of selected strategy, is to ensure you incorporate redundancy, that you are organised to keep backups current, and design it such that you eliminate single points of failure. Offsite storage of your backups is generally a good thing. -- egd Thecus N5200PRO >> Transporter >> ATC SCA2 >> ATC SCM100SLAT ------------------------------------------------------------------------ egd's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3425 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=39558 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
