Ten years ago my music library, consisting of ripped CDs and FLAC 24/96 files (downloaded from HDTracks etc…) were stored on a single drive Qnap NAS. My backup was on a iMac.
Now days, it’s stored on a SSD within a Roon Nucleus, with two separate backups on WD Elements HDs.
I am interested to know, are some people using Cloud Storage instead of USB drives for their backups?
2x WD portable USB 3 2TB drives.
Working store is in Mac Mini. I have one backup on a permanently connected NAS, and one on a USB hard disk that I keep at work and bring home to back up a couple of times a year (I don’t buy a lot of music these days - what I’ve bought since last off-site backup is a small amount, and at least some will be recoverable from source).
Source is the NAS, backup #1 is on the PC’s second HDD and then a further backup on a spare HDD in a USB caddy, kept elsewhere. Google Drive is a good idea though.
Backups are done with Robocopy.
Source is 4Tb SSD where I’m using about 700Gb.
I have a 4Tb enterprise HDD with a script that keeps it updated with mirrors of a my music store over USB.
Since 8 months I also store with Amazons Glacier Deep Archive cloud service where you can store lots of data for almost free (USD $0.00099 per GB) with a retrieval delay of 12 hours. I store every album/recording as an object. I dont expect to ever retrieve this data as it is expensive - but if I ever need its there.
Thanks @jan Just looked at that…looks a bit complicated for me. 
I have quite a small music library and of course family photos/videos. Is the Amazon idea mainly for corporate data storage?
Source for audio is Synology NAS plus 2x back ups & I keep any ripped CD’s in a box store.
Main backup is done every few weeks from NAS to a portable WD USB, all bought in downloads are additionally copied to another WD USB.
Domestic & business affairs are entirely separate in all respects
We store our digital music on a Synology NAS which acts as a repository for our streamers. When records are initially stored, a copy is made onto another NAS specifically used for backups. These initial backups are never modified. The Synology NAS is backed up nightly to a Synology NAS in another, physical location, using Hyper backup (a variation on the generation backup scheme). The nightly backups are easy to restore individual files from and spans quite a bit back in time.
The untouched backup is not for disaster recovery but to safeguard against human error. If I screw up metadata completely on a disc set or some such thing, then I have a place to go for the original. Incidentally, all metadata is stored in a separate SQL server to make it easily modifiable across platforms (LMS, Roon and DLNA). This too is versioned and backed up.
I am wary of cloud backup because there have been some rather horrible cases where service providers lost customer files. That, and the fact that they often don’t have disaster recovery available. In these cases, cloud backup makes for a false sense of security. AWS Glacier is another ballgame entirely and was made specifically for this purpose. Most cloud services are for convenience, not data security.
Last, but not least: A backup is worthless if you can’t restore it. In other words, always test your backups and make sure they actually work. And not just one or two files. Make up a fictive scenario and see if you can recover from it.
Thanks Mike
I wasn’t aware of the AWS S3 service. Our company has an AWS account… I might look into this.
My 2012 Mac mini is used as my music server with an internal 1TB Samsung SSD for my Naim UPnP music folder & Apple TV movies. Mini then backed up with one external 3TB G-Technology G-Drive, partitioned for Time Machine and the media folder, a LaCie D2 drive also permanently connected backing up the media folder, and finally a portable Western Digital 4TD drive used for quarterly back ups for all. Other than Time Machine, all back ups completed using Carbon Copy Cloner.
Thank you @YetiZone . Am I right in thinking, that you need the space on a Mac’s HDD for Time Machine to work, or is it connected to Apple’s Cloud?
I have a 2011 iMac, which is kind of on it’s last legs re software updates etc…but it does have some extra RAM and a reasonably new SSD. However, it’s only a 275gb drive. Enough for the iMac to function, but no good for storage as well.
Welcome! The operating system and media are all stored on the single internal 1TB SSD drive. I swapped out the original glacially slow 5400rpm 500GB drive when I bought it. As a result it is still pretty snappy in terms of every day use and boots up in 20 seconds.
Time Machine can be used on any external drive as a back up, the drive of choice selected in System Preferences. Time Machine works very well too - I had to use a few weeks back when something went wrong with an update and it then restored the Mini overnight.
I just have my Contacts, iCal, Mail, Podcasts, Safari, Apple TV and Apple Music synced to iCloud (and other idevices), that way, if anything falls over, it is easy to retrieve important data.
Understood re the iMac, a 2011 iMac is getting old, as is my 2012 Mini! IIRC, the Catalina OS becomes a legacy OS later this year, if so I’m probably going to buy a new M1 Mini when that happens, as this little unit has been a superb everyday family Mac and music server.
Sources for me are separate (mirrored) Synology NAS devices for my music and photos/home videos.
My backups are taken reasonably regularly (I don’t buy much music these days since I stream from Tidal via ROON), and are stored on WD USB-3 external hard drives located at my brother’s home some 50 miles away.
Probably at a bit of a risk if a nuclear device explodes midway between our two homes, but other than that I feel pretty safe with this arrangement.
It’s probably a generational thing, but I have never felt particularly comfortable with true cloud storage.
Any CDs I rip or downloads go to an external HDD and also get copied to the QNAP NAS so I have at least 2 copies. I should really get an external SSD as a 2nd backup just to be really safe.
For me at the moment cloud backup is not an option. I have a relatively modest (compared with some on here) collection of about 500GB of FLAC files but my broadband only has 1Mb uploads so to upload 500GB would take about 50 days! And that would prevent anything but the most simple browsing while the upload was taking place.
