Hello:
I know backups have been discussed on the forum before, but I wanted to ask the greater mind for advice on one (possibly ridiculous) perspective on the subject.
The standard backup advice for almost all digital media seems to be a minimum of 3 copies; the original, a second backup in-house, and a third backup either off site or in the cloud. In this case, both the second backup and the cloud backup are duplicates of the original. In my case, I use chronosync for this and it works fine.
Given that digital media is not archival, I am wondering is this is sound. A recent road trip gave me time to think (maybe too much time) and I began to question the advisability of making copies of a single, corruptible, original. For example, if a sector of one of the SSDâs in my K50 becomes corrupt for any reason, and I donât discover it before my bi-weekly backup process (likely since I canât possibly listen to everything on that SSD), wouldnât that corrupt sector just get propagated to the backups during my bi-weekly backup process?
Is there something technical about the backup process that would prevent this and I am just overthinking things?
I am beginning to wonder if instead of thinking of this as a process of backups I should start thinking of this as creating or maintaining 3 originals every time I add music to my digital library.
Can anyone offer wisdom? And is there any process within (or without) AMS to detect corruption on the primary music library used by AMS?
No, I donât think you are overthinking things. These are good questions to ponder.
My âsource of truthâ has been my NAS. The SSDs in my Antipodes act as a backup destination. The NAS is configured to periodically perform âdata scrubbingâ, which looks for inconsistencies. But more importantly, this setting is enabled:
Self-healing is a nice option, but I still back up my music to two different drives. A while back, I also mailed a friend a drive with a copy of all my music as an offsite backup destination. I need to do that again.
If one has invested a lot of money and time in their music library, I consider a NAS to be a must.
Thanks Kenny:
I have always thought of my K50 as the âparentâ library and my NAS as the âchildâ, but this is a good reason to reconsider that relationship. I will have to check if my Synology software has a data-scrubbing feature. Are you using a configuration built into your NAS or is it something third-party?
Just a quick reply. I canât remember which program I have, but it also has a comparison feature to check which files are different or missing between folders.
I have always assumed this would pick up any corrupted (or missing) files and flag them for me to investigate which I should treat as âgoodâ and therefore become the âmasterâ file.
Has been useful when I eg rename files or add metadata (eg add artwork) or potentially replace a 44.1 file with a higher res version
Very helpful info. I set up the data scrubbing feature. Monthly is the most frequent that can be scheduled.
It looks like the checksum feature had to be set up when I first created the partition on the NAS. I am not sure I want to re-build the entire library to get that going, but self-healing would be a good thing, so I might have to take on that challenge.
I opted for the re-build a few years ago after adding an expansion unit as I ran into a constraint the prevented me from expanding my existing volume. Scary to wipe clean so I could restore everything to a new reconfigured volume, but it went smoothly.
Both NAS and internal drive. I have like 11 TB of music scaled by PGGB, but only half of it has been copied down to local storage. When I did the comparison several years ago, local storage had an edge, so the better sounding albums are played off the local drive.
