backing up digital music

[denti alligator]

I feel stupid. I cannot understand the difference between incremental and differential backup.

Here's what I want:

To make a full backup of all my FLAC files.
To be able to make backups every week or so that ONLY backup new and changed files, BUT that delete the old versions of changed files (otherwise I'd run out of space fast). The changed files are critical, because I'm constantly retagging my FLAC, updating album art, etc. I want only the newest versions of these files saved, and the older files deleted.

Is this not possible?

[mcandmar]

Both start with a full backup of everything, usually you would run this once a week, or in an enterprise environment every weekend.

Differential backups copy all the files that have changed since the last FULL backup. i.e. if you change 10 files on a Monday, 10 files get backup up that night.  If you change 10 files on a Tuesday, 20 files get backed up that night.   The restore all of the data you need the Full backup from the weekend, and the most recent Differential copy.

Incremental backups are very similar except they only backup the files that have changed since the last backup.  So Monday nights backup copies 10 files, and the Tuesday nights backup only copies the 10 files that have changed since Monday and so on.  Advantage being each daily backup is smaller, the disadvantage is to restore all the data you need the Full backup, and then Monday and Tuesday nights backup too.  Its a royal pain in the ass to restore, and if one of those daily backups should fail you are pretty screwed.

In a business situation i would recommend backing up everything, every night onto a different location. i.e. Different Tape.   When you get to the stage where the data size is too large to copy daily, i'm guessing your MP3 collection may be, then go for Differential rotation.

Its also advisable to use more than one medium to backup onto.  Don't trust portable hard drives to work when you need them to, buy two of them and rotate between them on a weekly basis.

[RayP]

To change the subject slightly. Has anybody backed up their flac library to the cloud? My collection is only about 400 gb so it should be possible. Any inexpensive suggestions?

I currently use two 1TB drives, one for ripping and gardening and the other is a copy that I use for playing. I would like to have a copy offsite.

ray
 

[Paully]

Carbonite?

[John EH]

To change the subject slightly. Has anybody backed up their flac library to the cloud? My collection is only about 400 gb so it should be possible. Any inexpensive suggestions?

I currently use two 1TB drives, one for ripping and gardening and the other is a copy that I use for playing. I would like to have a copy offsite.

ray

Make your own cloud.  I use a free program called Owncloud

owncloud.org

I installed mine on my Godaddy Web Host and it reports I have 5.6 terabytes of available storage. 

You can install Owncloud on your own computer as well.

John

[royewest]

We've been using CrashPlan to back up the machines in our house and have been pretty happy with the price and service. It took a while to get the 250G or so of FLAC files along with everything else uploaded the first time. I also use Google Drive for everything except my music and that's a fantastic way to have access to all your stuff anywhere you have a secure browser, but it was too expensive for me to buy enough Drive storage to include my music files.

It's a pretty good practice to make local, full backups onto a hard disk or home NAS or something like that, in addition to cloud-based backups. That way if you (for example), lose a computer drive full of your files, you can get them back very quickly and easily from your local backup (relying on the cloud for the handful of files changed since you last backed up locally: restoring from the cloud can take a very long time). Your cloud backup is there in case of catastrophic home failure.