The idea of putting my (digital) music collection onto several big hard drives (in WAV or FLAC format, never as MP3 unless that's how they originally arrived at my house) sounds tempting. Goodbye big shelves full of jewel cases, goodbye "Where's that CD?", hello instant searching and easy storage. There's just one fly in the proverbial ointment. Having used computers since the late 1970's, I've learned the hard way never to trust a hard drive with anything! Yes, yes, I know, back things up, but being delicate magnetic media, even external hard drives which aren't running constantly are susceptible to mishaps and storage mistakes. And what if you plug in your backup after a few years of it being in storage, and it fizzles?

Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but as they say, just because you're paranoid...

I don't know. What's your experience been if you've taken the music server plunge?

Your music collection will grow, and will need to be backed up more often than once every few years.... I would think refreshing your backups monthly would be a good interval.

HDDs are cheap. Multiple, redundant copies is the way to go.

How about this for an idea? As you add new music files to the HDD, save a copy in a separate folder "To be copied to DVD". Include this folder in your weekly incremental backups. (You do have a backup strategy, don't you? :scratch2:)

When the folder gets to just under 4.7GB, write it to a DVD+/-R. Check the integrity of the DVD by reading it to the HDD on another PC. Put the DVD in a safe place, preferrably not in the same house as the PCs. :thmbsp:

Glenn.

Assuming you are simply transferring to HDD for convenience, do you not still have the original CDs in case something happens to the HDD and it's backups? I don't acquire tons of new music, but if I borrow a CD or take one out of the library, I'll rip it to my computer for "normal" listening and make a copy of the CD onto a CD-R for archive/more critical listening.

Hmm, I s'pose I could also rip the CD's to my hard drive(s) and put the CD's into storage (a cool, dry place, i.e. not an attic and never a basement. Did I ever tell you about the basement-stored mid-1970s Japan-only loudspeakers I once saw at a garage sale which, when I took the grilles off to check the cones, had white mildew halfway up the woofer cones?:mad:) Just one idea of many possible ones...

The idea of putting my (digital) music collection onto several big hard drives (in WAV or FLAC format, never as MP3 unless that's how they originally arrived at my house) sounds tempting. Goodbye big shelves full of jewel cases, goodbye "Where's that CD?", hello instant searching and easy storage. ...What if you plug in your backup after a few years of it being in storage, and it fizzles?It's more than tempting, it's a great way to go. The lion's share of my collection lives on my drives now -- man it's nice to be mostly done with CDs! For the discs that I couldn't bear to part with, I recently stuffed them into a 200 disc changer that I use as a transport, and as a place to hide the damn things. Stuffed the cases into storage after that; looks so much better in here!

Like hpsenicka said, a backup needs to be updated on a regular basis, dependent on how fast you add music to your drive. If it really, really worries you, keep two backup copies -- the odds of them both failing are basically nil. FWIW, I had my first drive failure in around a decade last month -- like most drive failures these days it was a controller flameout, not a catastrophic disc failure like in the past. I was able to reclaim my data easily by replacing the controller board with one from another drive. :thmbsp:

Go for it -- it changes everything (in a good way).