Re: [slim] Re: Backup: REV drive or external HD?
JJZolx wrote: 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. It is if you use a Unix server: http://www.monkeynoodle.org/comp/tools/backups. 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). I've done 1 backup to removable media (CDR, but I use MP3 and had the same album to disc ratio). It was tedious and sucky, and that's with a script doing everything but changing discs. 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. burning new discs to change tags sounds unpleasant. -- Jack at Monkeynoodle dot Org : It's a Scientific Venture! "I spent all me tin with the ladies drinking gin, so across the Western ocean I must wander." -- All for Me Grog, traditional ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
RE: [slim] Re: Backup: REV drive or external HD?
I was going to post the same thing! Robocopy is all you need, and it's free (you might have to download one of MS's toolkits to get it). -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of radish Sent: 23 August 2005 23:51 To: discuss@lists.slimdevices.com Subject: [slim] Re: Backup: REV drive or external HD? BBobley Wrote: > I use this very nice piece of Windows software called Second Copy. > http://www.secondcopy.com/ Basically, you give it a source folder and > a destination folder. The destination can be on another hard disk or > even another computer on your LAN. Then you just tell it to keep the > two in sync. So I simply put additional music files in my Slimserver > music folder hierarchy. Then, silently, at night, Second Copy copies > over just the new or changed files. Works great. Never gets in the > way. Yeah, I suppose I could have written a perl script to do > something similar, but Second Copy is dirt cheap and works really well. Wow! They charge $30 for a GUI on top of robocopy? I'm in the wrong business. The "script" I use to do the same thing is: robocopy /MIR -- radish ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Re: Backup: REV drive or external HD?
radish said the following on 23/08/2005 23:51: BBobley Wrote: I use this very nice piece of Windows software called Second Copy. http://www.secondcopy.com/ Basically, you give it a source folder and a destination folder. The destination can be on another hard disk or even another computer on your LAN. Then you just tell it to keep the two in sync. So I simply put additional music files in my Slimserver music folder hierarchy. Then, silently, at night, Second Copy copies over just the new or changed files. Works great. Never gets in the way. Yeah, I suppose I could have written a perl script to do something similar, but Second Copy is dirt cheap and works really well. Wow! They charge $30 for a GUI on top of robocopy? I'm in the wrong business. http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=108f89b9-be0b-4ec4-9736-3a43d39f0146 R. ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
Re: [slim] Re: Backup: REV drive or external HD?
On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 09:03 -0700, JulianL wrote: > I respectfully disagree with Pat. I am backing up to DVD+R, No problem, I was just trying to say that there is no consensus. For me, using 50 to 70 DVDs is just not all that attractive. Now that I've added a couple of DVD burners to my systems, it is a lot easier to consider. One other poster said that they have lots of tweaks of tags and meta data, which is something that really needs to be properly backed up. Re-ripping is painful to imagine, altho it isn't physically hard. Remembering what was wrong with the FreeDB/cddb data, and what you fixed is much worse. Backing up the slimserver database, which should have all the critical meta data is separate, and should be lots easier, than backing up the flac files. The important thing is to think about how important backups are to you, and decide what you want to backup, and then do it. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
