Entertainment For Lively Minds
Blimey, I never thought of this
Posted by Mark Godden on 25 January 2011 - 12:46am.
Did you? Is your data insured?
http://www.which.co.uk/news/2011/01/insurers-not-covering-downloads--242...
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Keep at least 2 copies
of everything. Worst case scenario I'd just have to do download it all again for free!
When you pay for a download, all you are doing is paying to re-imburse the artist for his or her art, and paying to get instant access to their music in a convenient way without trawling the murkier corners of he web looking for the freebies. Once you've paid..you have nothing to show for it of course.
There is an argument for having all your digital collection 'in the cloud' but then what would be the point of having millions of duplicate copies of every MP3 clogging up cyberspace and wasting Servers & associated energy resources? never mind the amount of time it would take to upload your average Word readers iTunes library even on superfast broadband.
Ideal solution would be to have some sort of generic music 'bank account' which has a secure record of all the music you've paid for (from any source) which you can access via streaming audio, or download afresh to your ipod whenever you need it. You'd need all the providers to buy in (or perhaps the other way around).
Perhaps "the music industry" should be working on things like this.
The trouble is
The service you describe exists
http://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/22/featured/6-free-online-music-storage...
Unfortunately, the record companies, along with the publishing companies have declared all these sites as evil pirate infringers. If you stream a track from your personal storage you are creating a performance and should pay performing rights, or some such nonsense.
I use DropBox's $10 a month for 50GB service for all my purchased music and photos. For me, having backups in your house is just not good enough. A burglary or fire will not skip a backup drive if it is sitting next to your PC. Get the stuff that matters in the cloud.
If you have a 160GB music collection, there is a lot of pain in getting it up there in the first place but the incremental updates are fine. I'm lucky, most of my music is from my own CDs with a smaller subset having come from purchased downloads. As soon as I purchase anything new, I drag it into my DropBox and know that it is safely backed up. My CD collection is insured under my contents so although I would have a big job repurchasing and ripping everything, I am happier to do that than spend the extra money on buying 200GB of storage.
Finally, as an alternative, consider my work colleague who carries a 750GB pocket drive in his work bag that has everything he cares about encrypted on it.
it has to be easy
We've discussed backups here before and I suspect the most vocal advocates are not simply the most paranoid but previous losers of data due to a failure or robbery etc. Dropbox is good because its easy to use and I think that's a very important issue. It doesn't matter how much you've invested in backup drives or blank dvds if they remain resolutely empty because its too much of a bind to do the backup. Nas drives are a good alternative because they can be squirreled away at the back of cupboards to make them less attractive to burglars (fire is still a problem but in the summer I'm going to bury an Ethernet cable down the garden so that I can put nas no2 in the garage - the main nas is backed up to nas 2 overnight so no effort required there). A cheaper alternative to dropbox is to install a second nas drive at a friends house and back up to it nightly.
I heart Apple Time Machine
That is all.
Amazon
How do MP3 downloads from Amazon work? (We can't get them here in Aus so I don't know.) Is it similar to downloading books for the Kindle, i.e. you can download any purchase again at any time from the same account?
It seems not
From Amazon's FAQ
Surely storage is so cheap
Surely storage is so cheap these days that anyone who doesn't have their MP3 library backed up a couple of times somewhere is just not thinking about what happens when their hard drive crashes... Just £50 quid or so will get you a USB 2.0 500Gb portable hard drive onto which you can back things up. Should the worst come to the worst it would be straightforward to set yourself up again.
Actually, this pretty much goes for all your data these days, not just your music. Backup, backup backup!
One word.
BACKUP.
My entire computer wirelessly Time Machines to my 1Tb backup drive every few minutes, and every six months I write my entire iTunes library out to data DVD and take it to work to sit in my top drawer. Takes bloody ages to write all the DVDs, but I like the extra comfort of it being visibly on disc as well as in the external drive.
That said, the sooner iTunes starts streaming and/or syncing from the Cloud, the happier I'll be.
Incremental
Why don't you set a program to do an incremental backup of your itunes libary to another folder on your PC every 6 months and just copy that onto DVD. Then delete the contents of the folder and do it again in another 6 months. I'm sure when I was trying out Mac backup applications I found one that would do that (I use SyncTwoFolders for my backup because I like the fact that my backup can be read by any PC and it might do as I've I've suggested). I know it'll be more of a pain should you ever have to use it but it's a last resort and hopefully the DVDs will continue to gather dust.
What He Said...
With all the technology advances of recent years, there are still only two types of hard drives available:
1) one that HAS failed...
2) one that WILL fail...
So, I just keep back ups of everything (in fact, I am in the midst of having to re-install Windows &, so I'm glad I have those back ups)
Mind you, I did read a worrying stat that said, even a hard drive that hasn't been spun up recently could fail even if it has been kept good virtually since new.
Hence, I also bought two vinyl LPs yesterday, Adele only £10.99, only £2 more than iTunes, I think that's great...
All this talk...
...made me investigate online storage. I found Mozy. Unlimited storage for a fiver a month, plus a nice little software tool to manage your backups.
AMAZING. I signed up on the spot, pretty much.
No affiliation, obviously. Other storage tools are available.
Two words
BACK UP.
Just joking.
Am I being a bit simplistic?
Isn't my iPod a back-up disc for all the stuff I have on iTunes?
Getting it back...
...off your iPod and onto your computer can be a proper, proper pain in the arse. There's third party software (like Senuti for the Mac), but it's a fiddle at best.
Two problems
1. That's fine as long as you have a small collection. They've never made an ipod big enough to hold all my stuff.
2. In the event of a burglary, pods and computers are very popular targets so making your backup as unattractive and hidden is a priority. When we were burgled, I lost 3 copies of my most recent holiday snaps; one lot on cd in my work shoulder bag that they took to put other things in, one on my hard drive and one on the card still in my camera.