If you use Carbonite and iTunes, be aware there is a conflict where Carbonite puts a lock on the itunes database file. If you're actively using itunes while Carbonite has the itunes database file locked, itunes needs to update the database at the end of every song played and the file ends up being corrupted:
iTunes Library.itl
Katrina, of course that's right when doing local backups too, right? (Or in any case it is in my current setup - the current .itl file can't get updated if iTunes is open.)
I've been thinking I might do Carbonite for the "work computer" (which has a decent-sized iTunes library, but not a monster).
Then use Amazon as a dedicated music backup. It's cheap, plus has the advantage of being able to stream.
Does that sound like a plan? Is Carbonite the best option for a single-computer backup? (ie, just the C drive, no externals)
@Doofy - I'd suggest using the free trials to see which one works for you. I think Carbonite's software gave more options, but I got much better upload speeds with Backblaze. That makes a big difference as the initial upload can take weeks.
I'm thinking of using the Amazon Cloud Drive as another backup for ease of use - but buyer beware. Amazon is rather draconian in how they handled ToS violations and licensing changes. In other words, waking up one day to find some of your music missing or your account deleted with no recourse shy of getting noticed by Boing Boing is entirely possible.
tl;dr - The more backups the merrier and don't rely on the people who sell you a product to back it up.
I actually meant Backblaze, or rather, "whatever that one was that Thom recommended."
The licensing thing is surely less of a concern with music that's DRM free, right? I have wondered about the eventual fate of "mpfrees" in the cloud, though - for example, would license holders someday be granted the ability to snoop through your collection and see if there's anything they think they might not have been paid for? Perhaps better off ponying up for the straight data backup...
All of this still leaves me in favor of hybrid models. Cloud backs you up against all your external hard drives getting destroyed in a flood. External hard drives back you up against the cloud company going bankrupt/getting hacked/getting Orwellian/having a massive meltdown/accidentally spilling coffee on the servers.
@Doofy - There is a difference between backing up to a cloud storage provider like Backblaze, Carbonite, etc. and using a service like Amazon Cloud or Google Drive or whatever. Backblaze encrypts that data you send them and, in fact, allows you to use your own keys to encrypt the data. On their end they are not looking at it as individual files, simply bits of data. They are not likely to look at whether or not your data is licensed to be up there and you can, in fact, prevent them from even trying to. Amazon, on the other hand, is providing you with a complete interface that accesses files like mp3s directly and indexes them based on the metadata. You could go through their ToS, but I would not be surprised to see them cover their own asses by removing albums they lost the licensing for.
With that said, I wouldn't be surprised to see the RIAA and their ilk try to pressure Congress for some laws to allow them to go through people's online backups. But in that case you just need to generate your own encryption key and store it in a very, very, very safe place.
@GP - Absolutely. I have a 3 TB external drive that I backup everything critical onto in addition to Backblaze. If my house is on fire/threatened by a hurricane I can grab it on the way out the door. But in case I don't get a chance, the files can be grabbed from Backblaze when I get a new PC. I also want to get back to burning photos to DVDs as a 3rd option. Those might even go to my parents' house or a safety deposit box.
Given that the cloud isn't as straightforward here yet (lower maximum limits for example) I've always relied on external drives. I have got into the habit of swapping my two main ones every month or so, keeping one at work. I've now got a third, bought earlier this week,which is currently residing in my car ready to go to my stepson's at the weekend - spread the risk is my belief! With the cost of external drives that is better for me than the cloud.
On their end they are not looking at it as individual files, simply bits of data. They are not likely to look at whether or not your data is licensed to be up there and you can, in fact, prevent them from even trying to.
Yeah, right. That's why I think this is probably a more secure (ie, against the RIAA!) option than Amazon or, heaven knows, iTunes Match. Need to just bite the bullet and do it. It's an affordable business expense for the work computer...not so much neither for the music computer!
@Doofy - sure, if anything else has an exclusive lock on the iTunes Library.itl file, then iTunes can't use it to update the play count when a song finishes.
Sorry I can't find the thread at apple discussions anymore (they improved the site, along the lines of emusic improvements). Anyway, several other cloud service companies had the same problem until they changed their software to use a shared lock, which they should have done all along. AFAIK Carbonite has not done that yet, but maybe they have by now! Agree with thom, try some trials and see which one you like the best.
I really should get another portable drive to put in the safety deposit box.
For me, online storage is too expensive for the money they want for the size of my library, and I have the same concerns about some misguided freedom haters willy-nilly deciding I've broken the law because I have a larger library than the norm.
I am doing a trial of Backblaze. By my back of an envelope calculation based on my library size and current average upload speeds and the speed of my internet connection it will take almost a year to do the initial backup. Maybe it's worth it in the long run. I kind of wish I could send them an external hard drive to get started.
Actually gives me another concern. They say their business model is based on small and big libraries balancing one another out. If that proves untenable as more and more folk e.,g. download movies, will they whak up the price for larger libraries after I've spent a year making myself dependent on them?
(I have three to four family members using this computer. Our combined music collections alone are +/- 470GB.)
Going back a week...! Greg, I noticed you got a "Blue Screen" about the same time I did. That was followed by a few little behavior weirdnesses, so I looked into doing a System Restore. Realized there actually had been a change to the computer - a Java update. So I rolled it back to before that time, and everything's boomps-a-daisy, at least so far.
Might be totally different for you, of course. This was on a Windows XP machine. Hoping that was the source of the problem, as the alternative was an HD problem.
@GP - I can totally understand your worries. Mozy screwed over a number of us when they switched from unlimited about 2 years ago. My cost was going to go from $6/month to over $100/month! While there's no guarantee with Backblaze, I will say that they've spent a lot of time on their blog talking about keeping it unlimited. A big part of that is supported by their self-made storage pods (if you're into that kind of thing, take a look at their blog where they actually detail how they make them for about 1/5 the cost of other enterprise solutions). So I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.
As far as I know, Crashplan is the only service that let's you seed the backup with your hard drive. But it costs $125!
Crashplan might also be a good alternative if you know someone who can offer some space on their home computer, too. They have free software that you can use to back your system up locally or to another person's system over the Internet. That might work well for some of you guys (my initial upload did take between 1 and 2 months).
Yeah, a couple of days into the trial I am still on the fence. I excluded a bunch of stuff, including all my son's files, and still I have 365 GB. The upload is averaging 3GB a day. So four months IF I leave the PC turned on 24 hours, which I don't usually. Usually it's off for 14 hours a day, so, say, 10 months. Not sure whether to just be very diligent with the external hard drive swapping - I keep one at home and one at work and rotate them monthly. Even at that rate, given that if I did have a meltdown or theft I would have to get them to send me a hard drive for a couple of hundred dollars I am not sure if it's worth it against the risk of losing one month of files.
@GP - Yeah, online backup might not work well for you. You can handle backups a couple way with external drives. Crashplan's free software acts like a more typical software and puts everything into large files that represent your backup sets. The positive is that the software will manage everything for you. The negative is that you are dependent on the software, and a single corrupt file can lose a whole lot of data.
Personally I use FreeFileSync. It's free (duh!) and can be set to sync files however you want. I set it to mirror whatever directories I want to backup to the external (that way files I deleted are removed from the backup too - Backblaze is my fall back for accidental deletions). You can setup exclusions and save different configs. Then you just load and run. Obviously it's a little more involved, but then the files are easy to access on the external when you need them.
There is a realtime part of it that you could try out so that it's constantly backing up until you swap out the drive, or else you could probably just schedule it to run once a week or something. I still do it manually, but eventually I'll automate it.
I'll take a look. I've been doing something similar - I have a program called Allway Sync that has performed very well for file synchronization (and has various settings for keeping or removing deleted files etc). I have been used to doing it manually, but I am running into some limitations on that. One is that way we have drifted into using our home computer. My wife and daughter now have growing music collections on there, and we use separate profiles, and it's harder to remember to go into their profiles and do backups from there. I probably need to fiddle with the folder sharing settings so that I can see them all from my profile and then automate a backup from there...I am sure there is a slicker way of doing it, just haven't looked at it that closely in a little while.
I'm uninstalling programs that have mysteriously appeared on my computer. I suspect many of them are things my daughter downloaded. One of them is called PlayReady. It is a Microsoft program. I came here to ask about it because I see it has to do with DRM. Does anyone know if I need it or if I can safely remove it?
Yeah, it's for DRM on MS products. You can safely remove it. If any files won't play or devices won't connect you'll probably be prompted to install it again.
Well, I signed up for Amazon Cloud Premium. It's just too cheap & convenient a backup option, coming at a time when I'm switching around computers and hard drives. The main idea is to have some kind of offsite backup, in case of dire events.
I started the Importer at midnight last night, and it's through about 5,000 songs (out of ~25K) this morning - that seems reasonably good. I can see that tags/organization are pretty messed up. Also seems like a number of albums that should be Matched are being Imported instead, but we'll see how that looks when the dust settles. I'm hoping this will give me a convenient way to upgrade some of my old 128 kb CD rips.
@Doofy... I've been somewhat remiss about backing up my music library. Just a couple months ago I finally got (back) into the habit of copying over my monthly downloads from their download locations into my official digital music library folders (and then a 2nd and 3rd time into the backups of the official). The idea is that I would be keeping 1 of those backups locally and the other offsite @ work. As things have worked out so far all my backups are sitting withing 2 feet of what they're backing up. I gotta remember to lug one of those HDs into work with me one of these days.
I've considered Amazon's cloud storage product in the past but just haven't followed through on that either. I haven't really kept abreast with what they offer beyond the basics of "offsite cloud storage". Please let me know how the following aspect works out for you when you get a chance: "...a convenient way to upgrade some of my old 128 kb CD rips". I don't think I realized that they introduced that kind of music/matching concept. I've got over 1,800 physical CD's ripped at 128k and if they could even automatically match/upgrade 75% of them I think I would immediately sign up for their service for that feature alone.
@Doofy - Any word on how they handle licensing changes? My biggest fear with using them is what happens when a label stops distributing through them? I know it's not likely to happen as frequently as it did with eMu, but if someone (e.g. Merge) decides that they're only going to sell digital through their own website would their albums then be deleted from your cloud storage? They've done stuff like that with books on Kindle and that's what concerns me.
That is a good question, Thom. It could also apply to an album that you imported yourself, but perhaps isn't licensed officially in a particular country.
I started to upload my music library to Amazon's cloud, but have only gotten about half way.
@luddite, they will automatically match but *not* upgrade your files. At least as I understand it, I will have to manually DL those files I want to replace (which I would want to do anyway, as I am picky about tags). It may be that iTunes Match may does indeed "push" the new files to you.
My backup situation is pretty much like yours - If I had an office out of the house, I would take a hard drive there! I view this as an affordable, last-ditch option. If I ever really lost my library, re-DLing *everything* from the Cloud Player would be almost prohibitively time-consuming.
@thom, no idea. Of course, any albums they can't match will be uploaded from my machine. At least to my knowledge, there's no scenario where they'd delete files you upload. I don't yet know how (or if) changes to the library vs cloud are synced with each other (even new music acquired from other than AMZ).
More than 1/3 done now, btw...Seems quite acceptable, and faster than I expected.
ETA, Check that, it's still in the "Matching" step...No telling how long a subsequent uploading step might take.
but perhaps isn't licensed officially in a particular country
I wonder about that too - I have bought CDs in several countries, and at least some of them are not purchaseable, electronically or otherwise, in the US.
If I ever really lost my library, re-DLing *everything* from the Cloud Player would be almost prohibitively time-consuming.
Same here. I gave one of those online backup services a try but realized that until I massively upgrade my internet connection (for which there would be little other reason right now) it would have taken the best part of a year to upload everything and presumably the same to get it back. I'm doing the backup drive two-step with the office as well.
Comments
iTunes Library.itl
I've been thinking I might do Carbonite for the "work computer" (which has a decent-sized iTunes library, but not a monster).
Then use Amazon as a dedicated music backup. It's cheap, plus has the advantage of being able to stream.
Does that sound like a plan? Is Carbonite the best option for a single-computer backup? (ie, just the C drive, no externals)
I'm thinking of using the Amazon Cloud Drive as another backup for ease of use - but buyer beware. Amazon is rather draconian in how they handled ToS violations and licensing changes. In other words, waking up one day to find some of your music missing or your account deleted with no recourse shy of getting noticed by Boing Boing is entirely possible.
tl;dr - The more backups the merrier and don't rely on the people who sell you a product to back it up.
The licensing thing is surely less of a concern with music that's DRM free, right? I have wondered about the eventual fate of "mpfrees" in the cloud, though - for example, would license holders someday be granted the ability to snoop through your collection and see if there's anything they think they might not have been paid for? Perhaps better off ponying up for the straight data backup...
With that said, I wouldn't be surprised to see the RIAA and their ilk try to pressure Congress for some laws to allow them to go through people's online backups. But in that case you just need to generate your own encryption key and store it in a very, very, very safe place.
@GP - Absolutely. I have a 3 TB external drive that I backup everything critical onto in addition to Backblaze. If my house is on fire/threatened by a hurricane I can grab it on the way out the door. But in case I don't get a chance, the files can be grabbed from Backblaze when I get a new PC. I also want to get back to burning photos to DVDs as a 3rd option. Those might even go to my parents' house or a safety deposit box.
Yeah, right. That's why I think this is probably a more secure (ie, against the RIAA!) option than Amazon or, heaven knows, iTunes Match. Need to just bite the bullet and do it. It's an affordable business expense for the work computer...not so much neither for the music computer!
Sorry I can't find the thread at apple discussions anymore (they improved the site, along the lines of emusic improvements). Anyway, several other cloud service companies had the same problem until they changed their software to use a shared lock, which they should have done all along. AFAIK Carbonite has not done that yet, but maybe they have by now! Agree with thom, try some trials and see which one you like the best.
I really should get another portable drive to put in the safety deposit box.
For me, online storage is too expensive for the money they want for the size of my library, and I have the same concerns about some misguided freedom haters willy-nilly deciding I've broken the law because I have a larger library than the norm.
Actually gives me another concern. They say their business model is based on small and big libraries balancing one another out. If that proves untenable as more and more folk e.,g. download movies, will they whak up the price for larger libraries after I've spent a year making myself dependent on them?
(I have three to four family members using this computer. Our combined music collections alone are +/- 470GB.)
Might be totally different for you, of course. This was on a Windows XP machine. Hoping that was the source of the problem, as the alternative was an HD problem.
Not surprised a recent Java update caused problems.
As far as I know, Crashplan is the only service that let's you seed the backup with your hard drive. But it costs $125!
Personally I use FreeFileSync. It's free (duh!) and can be set to sync files however you want. I set it to mirror whatever directories I want to backup to the external (that way files I deleted are removed from the backup too - Backblaze is my fall back for accidental deletions). You can setup exclusions and save different configs. Then you just load and run. Obviously it's a little more involved, but then the files are easy to access on the external when you need them.
There is a realtime part of it that you could try out so that it's constantly backing up until you swap out the drive, or else you could probably just schedule it to run once a week or something. I still do it manually, but eventually I'll automate it.
I started the Importer at midnight last night, and it's through about 5,000 songs (out of ~25K) this morning - that seems reasonably good. I can see that tags/organization are pretty messed up. Also seems like a number of albums that should be Matched are being Imported instead, but we'll see how that looks when the dust settles. I'm hoping this will give me a convenient way to upgrade some of my old 128 kb CD rips.
I've considered Amazon's cloud storage product in the past but just haven't followed through on that either. I haven't really kept abreast with what they offer beyond the basics of "offsite cloud storage". Please let me know how the following aspect works out for you when you get a chance: "...a convenient way to upgrade some of my old 128 kb CD rips". I don't think I realized that they introduced that kind of music/matching concept. I've got over 1,800 physical CD's ripped at 128k and if they could even automatically match/upgrade 75% of them I think I would immediately sign up for their service for that feature alone.
I started to upload my music library to Amazon's cloud, but have only gotten about half way.
My backup situation is pretty much like yours - If I had an office out of the house, I would take a hard drive there! I view this as an affordable, last-ditch option. If I ever really lost my library, re-DLing *everything* from the Cloud Player would be almost prohibitively time-consuming.
@thom, no idea. Of course, any albums they can't match will be uploaded from my machine. At least to my knowledge, there's no scenario where they'd delete files you upload. I don't yet know how (or if) changes to the library vs cloud are synced with each other (even new music acquired from other than AMZ).
More than 1/3 done now, btw...Seems quite acceptable, and faster than I expected.
ETA, Check that, it's still in the "Matching" step...No telling how long a subsequent uploading step might take.