Why you should digitize(back up) your music collection

[Face]

http://jimmyauw.com/2010/09/13/is-there-such-an-immortal-thing-we-are-talking-digital-media/

I have some CD's that were ruined from being kept in my car, but for those kept indoors, I'm not sure I've lost any yet. Then again, it's pretty rare that I spin disks nowadays.

I know this will come up, but yes it's possible for a hard drive to go bad, it will happen to everyone at some point in time. That's why you should back up your HD on an external that is not plugged into anything except when backing up.

[mmadden28]

When I was ripping my CD to FLAC for my Squeezebox last year, I somehow accidentally cracked my Slipknot Vol 3 CD BEFORE I ripped it :mad:. It irkes me too much to pay for the CD again. If I had ripped it already I could have easily burned off an exact duplicate for when I wanted to use the actual CD. Well I'm not expecting good results, but I'm going to attempt to repair the CD and hope error correction works well. :o
My biggest problem in the distant past was always with cassettes, either with excessive heat, something getting spilled on it, or being left too close to a magnet. :mad:

I have 2-3 duplicates of my Hard Drives--not just because of the investment in time to rip the CDs, but also because of all of my precious photos and vids of my children. Right now Amazon GB has a 2TB HDD for under $100. There is really no reason not to backup and backup often. Eventually I'll store one as an archive in my safe deposit box.

[nadams]

I also backup my collection to FLAC, and then burn those files to DL DVD's and take them in to work for offsite storage. I've got backups of all my pictures and documents offsite as well.

[poofyhairguy]

FLAC rules!! I use multichannel FLAC plus the mkv container for all my Blu Ray audio.

[jimmydep]

I know this will come up, but yes it's possible for a hard drive to go bad, it will happen to everyone at some point in time. That's why you should back up your HD on an external that is not plugged into anything except when backing up.

Good sound advice.

[sm88]

I back everything up with FLAC, and then if I want to listen to a disc for whatever reason, I will burn a copy of the CD rather than risk damaging the original. Works well

[skrol]

What do you all use to rip CDs to FLAC?

[dkg999]

What do you all use to rip CDs to FLAC?

dbPoweramp, MediaMonkey, Exact Audio Copy all will work to rip to FLAC.

I use a NAS server with 4 TB of RAID5 storage to store and back-up my music library. Yes, simultaneous failure of 2 drives would not be good, but small chance of that happening.

[quadzilla]

dbPoweramp, MediaMonkey, Exact Audio Copy all will work to rip to FLAC.

I use a NAS server with 4 TB of RAID5 storage to store and back-up my music library. Yes, simultaneous failure of 2 drives would not be good, but small chance of that happening.

Just a word of caution; even if only one drive fails, you may not be able to rebuild that raid array. The problem is that as drives grow larger, the chances of one of the remaining drives having at least one bad sector, and therefore an unrecoverable error, increases to near certainty. If there is even one bad sector on any the remaining drives, you'll be unable to rebuild that array. See, i.e.;

As well-informed commenter Liam Newcombe notes:

The key point that seems to be missed in many of the comments is that when a disk fails in a RAID 5 array and it has to rebuild there is a significant chance of a non-recoverable read error during the rebuild (BER / UER). As there is no longer any redundancy the RAID array cannot rebuild, this is not dependent on whether you are running Windows or Linux, hardware or software RAID 5, it is simple mathematics. An honest RAID controller will log this and generally abort, allowing you to restore undamaged data from backup onto a fresh array.