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Topic: Long term lossless music archive (Read 34566 times) previous topic - next topic
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Long term lossless music archive

Reply #25 –
To stay on topic for a change, I agree that HD-s are the most convenient and most reliable however a single backup is not enough though. Added benefit that there are firms out there which can recover data from HD-s in case the circuitry or mechanics is gone. Probably less likely to find companies that deal with DVD-s.

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #26 –
well it all comes down to the question of how much money you can spend. if you can afford it, buy HD's - let's say one for every day use, one for backup and for the paranoid ones amongst us a third one for backing up the backup.

it's very comfortable if the backup HD's are portable usb/firewire ones => again a question of money.

keep the first HD in your PC, plug the second and third in only when you have a bunch of files to add, and for the rest of the time let them rest in a secure, earthquake-fire-or volcanoeproof safe and you'll fall asleep with the relieving smile on your face every night, dreaming of your music-treasure.


well as for myself, i can't afford it and have to stay with DVD's. buying good-quality ones - never had a failure with my intenso DVD-R. price: 0,6 €/DVD which means 0,13 €/GB => 0,15 US$/GB

as i am kind of paranoid too, i use quickpar to take care of DVD-media degradation and save the par2 files on HD.

so.....count your money and decision is taken...

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #27 –
When your DVD starts to die, your drivers might refuse to read them full stop which will render your quickpar useless. Did anyone actually tested this? I can understand that par can be useful when you transmit something over a bad channel noisy channel (like a analogue modem), but did anyone actually tested with dying CD-s  DVD-s? Everybody is going on about them and put a lot of faith in them, but did they actually test it?

Triza

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #28 –
Quote
and for the rest of the time let them rest in a secure, earthquake-fire-or volcanoeproof safe and you'll fall asleep with the relieving smile on your face every night, dreaming of your music-treasure.
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Nice sarcasm

This thread is out of control. Come on people, it's just music!! we're not talking about backing up CIA stuff here!!
If you loose your backup just rip the CD again, and if you loose the CD just buy another one!! 

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #29 –
I use 2 internals HDs for my ripped records (no RAID), and 2 external USB HDs for back-up. IMHO, easier to manage than optical discs.

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #30 –
Quote
When your DVD starts to die, your drivers might refuse to read them full stop which will render your quickpar useless. Did anyone actually tested this? I can understand that par can be useful when you transmit something over a bad channel noisy channel (like a analogue modem), but did anyone actually tested with dying CD-s  DVD-s? Everybody is going on about them and put a lot of faith in them, but did they actually test it?

Triza
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well let's talk about that 10, 20 years later ;-)

as for now my dvd-ram reads everything i put in its slot, except for some cd-r's which my cd-burner awaits eagerly...

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #31 –
Long time lurker here. I've always found this place a wonderful haven for digital audio advice, but this thread really takes the cake! Plenty of good advice as usual, but too many people appear to have just stumbled in off the interweb:
Quote
This thread is out of control. Come on people, it's just music!! we're not talking about backing up CIA stuff here!!
If you loose your backup just rip the CD again, and if you loose the CD just buy another one!!  :P
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I agree this thread needs pruning, but not in that "this doesn't matter at all" way. Let's all remember what the original poster, [a href="http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showuser=22091]ametrano[/url], said:
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I've filled up my 200GB HD and I'm now wondering what I should do for long term archival of my live recordings' FLAC files.
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I take it the man has been recording to FLAC; he has no CD to re-rip from. And, generally for others wrestling with their own lossless archives, 200GB does not sound like much fun to re-rip.
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On the long run what will be the weaker support: HD or DVD?
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As many have already posted, each has terminal issues, from dye fading to crashing, assuming you are continuously running the drives. You also are not guaranteed that either HD or DVD drive will work with the data and power interfaces of the future, and thought would have to be put into either what format you burn your DVDs in, or what filesystem you use to store your data. I personally don't trust the dye on burnable discs as much as hard drive platters, but I allow duration of both is questionable.

If this is more a convenience issue, you are better off going with hard drives. Transfer rates are much, much higher, as [a href="http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showuser=22091]ametrano[/url] himself has pointed out, and this makes the task of archiving much more flexible: you can transfer files to newer, more currently compatible hard drives much quicker down the road, and the time savings will increase with the size of the archive. But, as some have pointed out, DVDs are probably more cost-effective, though you may be sacrificing durability to your frugality.

I have nothing more to say about DVDs, but there has been quite a lot of noise about hard drives, and more specifically, RAID-0:
Quote
I made a 600GB RAID-0 array using two 300GB Maxtor drives (I use a single 200GB drive as my main drive). Why? Why not is my answer! Besides being super conveniant, hard drives are cheap after all, and while I do use the array for storing other stuff besides music (like images of my OS and photos), my main consideration was actually lossless audio storage. Anything of importance, including all my music, is mirrored to another drive on another PC via LAN. As anyone will tell you, redundancy is the key to using RAID-0, plus it's nice to not have to worry should one drive in the array ever fail. Some might say RAID-0 is the creation of the devil, but I've actually been using the technology for a long time now and have never run into any issues. (...)
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What it comes down to is that I honestly don't care what other people use. I have no interest in converting anyone, and hopefully my posts don't come across as trying to. My replies are simply me trying to defend my personal decisions. I can never mention RAID-0 without the nay sayers jumping all over me and it's annoying to say the least. (...) So, let us just say RAID in one possible option for the original poster, and that some don't like it it, while some do, and leave it at that.
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While I don't have the benefit of Digisurfer's years of experience with a RAID-0 array, and he certainly has a inviolate right to make his own choice in this situation, this is not a thread about Digisurfer, but a thread about music archives. Specifically, ametreno's archive. Triza and others are right to call Digisurfer's "RAID-0 backed with NAS" wasteful and sub-optimal for archival purposes, and it is not okay to leave such advice ambiguously "at that." (Alternatively, if Digisurfer is not offering advice, as he claims, then his comments are not germaine to this thread.)

I will first say that the classic application of RAID is not for archival purposes, but [a href="http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/concepts/relFault.html]fault tolerance[/url] in an enterprise environment. Archival does not demand that data be available for access 24/7: redundant arrays were designed for situations where the possible failure of individual drives would not interrupt access to the data. It is only a corollary benefit that RAID tends to make the data hardier. You are better off, for archival purposes, running only one drive and periodically backing up to a second, removing this drive and storing it in a place other than the inside of your computer.

Keep in mind a blown power supply, lightning strike, controller failure, chassis spontaneously combusting etc. can take out both drives in a RAID-1 array. RAID only protects against individual drive failure. In fact, running two hard drives in a RAID array is far more likely to blow out a power supply, for example, than running a single hard drive. Further, if unlike Digisurfer you don't really know what you are doing, as we should expect, it is much easier to cock up a RAID array than it is a discrete IDE drive.

RAID-0, of course, has none of any other RAID's fault protection, and it is thus not a true RAID. It exists only for data throughput.

As many have pointed out, RAID-0 is not necessary for music archives. RAID-0 only increases performance in sustained transfers, where a lot of contiguous data is being accessed. Music archives would indeed be contiguous, but I can't imagine when you would need that kind of throughput. Certainly not to play, and probably not to transfer to anything other than another RAID-0 array.

Further, I will point out knowledgable people have found no benefit to using RAID-0 in any application on the desktop, apart from video editing. Most tasks depend on hard drive seek times, which RAID-0 actually slows, especially when you mix in the poor quality of most on-board RAID chips.

NAS, meanwhile, will have you building a whole other computer to mount your archival hard drives in, and unless you are willing to invest in a full Gigabit ethernet home network, it will be slower than USB 2.0 or Firewire. If you are also looking to have a music server on your home network, consider sharing your single drive, rather than the more costly NAS solution.

Yes, you COULD run a RAID-0 + NAS for your music backups, but its not the best use of your money.

A convenient, cost-effective archival solution would involve an equal number of internal and external hard drives, with each internal drive being periodically backed up to its external mate. If you have a smaller budget and greater patience and time, another solution would be archiving a single set of drives to quality DVD, whatever the details. If you have neither the money nor the time, buy external enclosures for a single set of drives and run them only when necessary. There is really no benefit to spending money for a 2nd set of hard drives, only to throw them all into a RAID array, whatever the flavor.

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #32 –
Now I think I should jump to this thread.

Well, I also have quiet a big music material in lossless compressed format, mainly bootlegs downloaded from different places from internet.

The original question in the beginning of the thread was, in long term which is better, to store files on hard disk, or on DVDs.

My vote is definitely the DVD (or in generally, optical media), because of the following. In my opinion, a hard disk, or a complete PC simply can be broke down anytime. For example a failure of the power supply can trash all the hard disk, whatever Raid construction is made. And I think a good raid construction is not cheap. I've experienced a Raid collapse at my work, because a cheap Raid card was used, and a simple mistake was done by a colleague.
Or simply a lightning strike could reach the PC through the power system.

On the other hand, DVDs are very cheap nowadays (or at least if you buy them in the black market  ), and quality DVDs are also on reachable price.
Of course DVDs are also get worse with the time, but at least not suddenly, rather in long term. When some years are elapsed, the data on the disks can be re-burned to new disks.

Also, there are some methods to ensure the data integrity, and recovery files can be generated to ensure, that in case of some parts get bad on the DVD, the data files can be recovered.
There was in interesting thread at
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....pic=31146&st=25
and also is worth to check topics at Quickpar forum:
http://www.quickpar.org.uk/forum/viewforum.php4?f=6

One other thing: as far as I know, but I'm not an expert, DVD-RAM format is very reliable way for archiving, much better than DVD-R or DVD+R. But DVD-Ram disks are not cheap of course.

Regards:
batagy

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #33 –
Fooh... А lot of... table-talk
I'll be brief:
I have two Samsung SP1614N 160 Gb HDDs. Data loss is unacceptable for me. So I just back up one HDD to another... There is no chance for them to die simultaneously. However, I'm fed up with  manual work for back up... So next thing for me to buy is a GA-K8NS PRO mobo with an ATA RAID and switching my two drives to a RAID 1 controller. (Hope, there would be no data loss while switching the disks to that RAID controller)...
Pros of RAID 1 (mirror) solution:
- very-very time-saving; (actually - no time loss)
- portable (comparing to tens of DVDs);
Although it might be more expensive then buying a DVD-RW drive + 100 disks (An SP1614N 160 Gb costs now about $90, don't know about the cost of an alternative solution)... But I won't have to rewrite tens of them (data is always changing, tags and the like)... how often?? I won't have to fuss about restoring all that stuff to a new HDD. "HDD is dead, long live HDD!"

PS I'm not afraid of lightnings, RAID controller collapse or aliens invasions...

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #34 –
Maybe a little OT but an observation:

For all discussion about cost, perhaps your age will make the decision for you. Young people have more time than money, and older folks like me have more money than time*. Outside of my day job, my time is invaluable (unfortunately it's not worth much in my day job  ), so I do the HD route. I think if I were under 30, I'd probably go with DVDs. In fact I used to use CD-R (before DVD-R was available/affordable) until I got to burned disc #70, then I got sick of it. I was about 31 then. Nowadays I think spending ~$150 for a large external HD and dropping a folder on it with one click is SO WORTH IT....

edit: not that I have lots of money now, I just value it less than my time.

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #35 –
Quote
Maybe a little OT but an observation:

For all discussion about cost, perhaps your age will make the decision for you. Young people have more time than money, and older folks like me have more money than time*.


My thoughts exactly! It was not long ago that I could spend an entire weekend/s tweaking my htpc but unfortuntely work and life got in the way! I no longer have the time to spend and my time is worth quite a bit more these days.
So to each his own but I put in a vote for 1xHard drive backup and 1xDVD backup.

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #36 –
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What is the point of RAID0 against two 300 GB partition is beyond me. Just because you want to see one contiguous 600 GB. Mmm... Wait until one HD dies. It will make the other was a useless lump of metal too since your data will be gone.

Triza
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What's the point?  Well speed might be the one. Thinking of two 10000rpm Maxtors in RAID0 ain't so bad idea. Everything has it's pros and cons. This is just tradeoff. Speed for security. Let's say there is chance 1:5000 that you harddrive will fail. When you make RAID0 chance gets to 1:2500, but you will gain near double speed of HD transfers (not seek). I think it's not so bad business.

..and if you you don't use RAID0 it does not mean that things could not f**k up anyway.

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #37 –
Quote
1. It's almost impossible to play your lossless tracks = you have to keep a lossy (ie. mp3) edition = adds to the price
2. HD space is super cheap
3. Quality DVDs are NOT cheap

I have 2,7 terrabytes of storage and a DVD burner I hardly ever use. I never keep a harddrive for more than 1 year but sell them of at gigabyte price (ie if I have a 160 gig and a new 250 gig costs $120, I'll auction the 160 off for $75). That way it's reliable and I have a method for growth.

(edited for spelling)
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    1. impossible to play lossless tracks from DVDs? interesting idea.
2&3. Well cakebox of 25 TDK or Memorex DVD+R costs 7.5 euros here. It means 0.3 euro per DVD+R medium.. it means 0.0683 euro per 1GB. At this price 250GB harddrive would cost 15.957 euros..  So did you miss something in elementary school? 

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #38 –
Of course everything is a trade off.  You can go with RAID-0 and have massive bandwidth performance, at the increased risk of data loss (because now one drive can take twice as much data as that single drive holds, thus increasing the odds of failure).

The alternative is to use a level of RAID that supports fault tolerance.  Obviously the best trade-off here is to use RAID-5, if you can afford three or more hard-drives of equal capacity.  This provides fault tolerance, with very good read performance, but relatively average write performance (or poor write performance if your using software RAID-5). 

RAID-5 Capacity = (5*N)-N where N is the smallest volume size that is to be used in the array.  I have a four disk RAID-5 made from 200GB Western Digital SATA drives.  It provides 558GB of space (because a 200GB drive only actually provides 186GB of space).

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #39 –
I've started keeping game installations and video on my RAID-0 array simply because it's performance is noticeably better than the single 200GB drive I have which contains my Windows XP installation (would like to replace this with two Raptors in RAID-0 hehe). As I said before, anything important is backed up to, or stored already on, my backup drive which is my RAID-0 array. That is mirrored to a backup drive on another PC (my wife's), and I forgot to mention anything important on her backup drive is also mirrored to mine. Basically either one of our PC's could literally go up in flames, and nothing important would be lost. Is this wasteful? Maybe, and sure I'll admit that maybe I don't really need RAID-0, but it sure as heck is conveniant having one big drive, my setup works great for me, and it has never let me down in several years of use. Most importantly, it is completely redundant, and that's all that really matters regardless of the setup. Plus as others have said, hard drives are cheap. People can theorize all they want, but in actual practice I have no complaints. My plan is to eventually add one more 300GB drive to her PC when space starts becoming a problem, thus creating a RAID-0 array identical to mine, and also get a gigabit router for faster transfers between PC's (one of those gamefuel ones would be nice I think). If you don't agree or don't like my ideas, too bad for you. Why should anyone care anyways, it's my data after all lol. Besides, I'm a PC enthusiast, so this stuff just happens to be fun for me as well.

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #40 –
Quote
Quote
What is the point of RAID0 against two 300 GB partition is beyond me. Just because you want to see one contiguous 600 GB. Mmm... Wait until one HD dies. It will make the other was a useless lump of metal too since your data will be gone.

Triza
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What's the point?  Well speed might be the one. Thinking of two 10000rpm Maxtors in RAID0 ain't so bad idea. Everything has it's pros and cons. This is just tradeoff. Speed for security. Let's say there is chance 1:5000 that you harddrive will fail. When you make RAID0 chance gets to 1:2500, but you will gain near double speed of HD transfers (not seek). I think it's not so bad business.

..and if you you don't use RAID0 it does not mean that things could not f**k up anyway.
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OK I forgot to spell it out. Obviously I know why one uses RAID0, which is of course speed. Nothing new there. However as an archive especially music archive speed is irrelevant. I can assure you that that even 7200 rpm hd is not needed for playback. As far as I am concerned I would love to go back to 5400 rpm drives because they run cooler. So anyway, let's not state the obvious here, because it adds little to the discussion.

I gets me that a newbie comes along asks a question and we give the poor sod a stupid advice. In fact it is not even an advice. RAID0 came up because somebody has this because why not. Then everybody chimes in and keep floating this RAID0 thing.

Ah I am just wasting my time here. Whatever

Triza

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #41 –
Quote
I've started keeping game installations and video on my RAID-0 array simply because it's performance is noticeably better than the single 200GB drive I have which contains my Windows XP installation (would like to replace this with two Raptors in RAID-0 hehe). As I said before, anything important is backed up to, or stored already on, my backup drive which is my RAID-0 array. That is mirrored to a backup drive on another PC (my wife's), and I forgot to mention anything important on her backup drive is also mirrored to mine. Basically either one of our PC's could literally go up in flames, and nothing important would be lost. Is this wasteful? Maybe, and sure I'll admit that maybe I don't really need RAID-0, but it sure as heck is conveniant having one big drive, my setup works great for me, and it has never let me down in several years of use. Most importantly, it is completely redundant, and that's all that really matters regardless of the setup. Plus as others have said, hard drives are cheap. People can theorize all they want, but in actual practice I have no complaints. My plan is to eventually add one more 300GB drive to her PC when space starts becoming a problem, thus creating a RAID-0 array identical to mine, and also get a gigabit router for faster transfers between PC's (one of those gamefuel ones would be nice I think). If you don't agree or don't like my ideas, too bad for you. Why should anyone care anyways, it's my data after all lol. Besides, I'm a PC enthusiast, so this stuff just happens to be fun for me as well.
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You're really twisting words here.  Your system is not redundant.  If you do a backup every single time a byte on that drive changes (and you the backup within a second of the byte being changed), then you have redunancy.  What you have is called a backup, plain and simple.  It's a recommended thing to do, but you do not have redunancy in the sense that it is usually applied when talking about data and data security.

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #42 –
Everyone is certainly entitled to run whatever hardware they want, but I'm with Triza. RAID0 offers nothing in the context of the original question.

    My suggestion is rsync your music to an external firewire drive. Whenever you rip more music or make changes to your current music just run the rsync command to sync the changes over to the firewire disk. Since you won't be recopying data that's already backed up your future backups will be quick. You can unplug the firewire drive when not in use to prevent power surge damage and the like. I'd also, maybe once a year, backup to optical media and store at a different location. Alternatively, you could just get a second firewire drive and store it somewhere else as well. Cheap and effective.

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #43 –
hd for backup? do they sell such with a 'record inhibit' switch, or do i backup my virus collection as well everytime i read from such disk?

(iam trying to backup my videowork to dual-layer dvds on the other hand, but thats like huge pain in the ass since almost every lil project is above 40 gigs...)
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #44 –
Quote
hd for backup? do they sell such with a 'record inhibit' switch, or do i backup my virus collection as well everytime i read from such disk?

That's right write-once media protects the data from modification.

Also hard disks have fat tables which can easily be corrupted, write/read-heads that wear, platters that scratch & magnetic surfaces that would probably corrupt with the wave of a medium power magnet.

Todays hard disks are disposable, there not meant to last a life time.

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #45 –
Quote
You're really twisting words here.  Your system is not redundant.  If you do a backup every single time a byte on that drive changes (and you the backup within a second of the byte being changed), then you have redunancy.  What you have is called a backup, plain and simple.  It's a recommended thing to do, but you do not have redunancy in the sense that it is usually applied when talking about data and data security.
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I guess I have redundancy according to you then. The thing here is that all of the stuff I backup is unchanging unless I change it myself (which happens infrequently) or when I add new files, and whenever I do I immediately mirror things over (thankfully only the changes get binary compared and then copied). Maybe it's not automatic like RAID-1 is, but I would still consider it redundant despite being a more manual process. Well, it's redundant enough for me anyways. To me it means one PC could burn up in flames and I would not lose anything important from either PC at all.

Ok I get it, people despise RAID-0. Personally I feel it gets a bad rap most of the time, but FUD is funny that way. When I first started using it I was a worry wart too, until time passed and I realized the sky wasn't actually going to fall on my head at any second. Sure it's not particularly useful unless you want speed and one big drive, but some of us feel the conveniance outwieghs the risk when handled properly. I guess I'm just not as paranoid or worrisome as most of you. No regrets so far and likely there never will be.

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #46 –
Personally I have two big harddrives. One internal, the other external. 300 GBs each. I have all my FLAC rips on the internal disk and I have them backed up on the external one, that's always off, unless I have a new rip to copy over. All this on a computer protected by an UPS.

It took me months to rip and properly tag all my music. This way I feel *reasonably* safe.

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #47 –
Digisurfer: sorry, lol, but whats the convinience? (to see two drives as one or..?)
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #48 –
Quote
Ok I get it, people despise RAID-0. Personally I feel it gets a bad rap most of the time, but FUD is funny that way. When I first started using it I was a worry wart too, until time passed and I realized the sky wasn't actually going to fall on my head at any second. Sure it's not particularly useful unless you want speed and one big drive, but some of us feel the conveniance outwieghs the risk when handled properly. I guess I'm just not as paranoid or worrisome as most of you. No regrets so far and likely there never will be.

I'm sorry but if we are discussing archival purposes, your RAID-0 solution is sub-optimal and, actually, downright wrong to suggest.
RAID-0 is the least safe way to keep data. Every hard drive has an x.xx% of failure. With RAID-0 you have double that percentage and if a single drive fails you lose everything. How can you suggest this for archival purposes is beyond me *and* logic.
Search the internet and see for yourself if there is anybody agreeing with you.

I'm not saying RAID-0 is the devil. I'm saying it's not the right solution for archiving valuable data (as music).

Long term lossless music archive

Reply #49 –
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I'm not saying RAID-0 is the devil. I'm saying it's not the right solution for archiving valuable data (as music).
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So what your saying is that there is only one right way to do things (yours) and that if I want to do things my own way, which I've proven to myself that it works fine, I'm wrong? You know, I keep waiting for the sky to fall on my head, but it hasn't yet. Thanks to how I do things, it probably never will. I said it before and I'll say it again, there is nothing wrong with RAID-0. Do you stop driving just because you might be in an accident? Sorry, but I remain unconvinced that the world is going to end just because I (and I'm sure plenty others too afraid to post here) use RAID-0. Hopefully no one has been assuming that I'm trying to say it's better, because I'm not. I only posted originally because it's what I use and it works fine for me. It's just one option of many. Is it right for the original poster? Who knows, it's up to him/her. Should have known better of course, but I guess I must like being flamed or something heh.