Keeping the backup of my music files in sync

I add music to the SSD and an external drive plugged into my Nucleus+.
I just backed up all 6.50TB to an external drive plugged into my Mac which took several days using Carbon Copy Pro. To ensure that my backup is is sync with the music files on the Nucleus should I continue to do incremental backups with Carbon Copy pro, or would it be safe to add new music files directly to the backup drive when I add them to the Nucleus?

I’m assuming that CC is wise about its incremental backups, and the changes would copy quite fast. I’ve only used it a couple of times, and that was years ago so I don’t recall what it’s using in the back end. But I’d certainly try that approach. You approach of copying the file to both drives would work, but may confuse CC in the future if you want to try to use it for incremental backups.

I do something similar to you. I groom all my music manually in a tag editor. I then mount the ROCK drive on my mac and copy the new music to the internal drive. I also repackage my new music as ALAC and drop a copy in my lossless iTunes library. A wrote a little script that backs up various directories on a macMini I use as a server. And part of that script is to mount the ROCK share and backup my music to a drive on the mini. Rather than use CC, I use rsync. It’s a bit more bare metal with only a command line interface, but it is rock solid from a performance point of view.

hope that helps,
Sheldon

Pretty sure that Carbon Copy is simply a fancy GUI wrapper for rsync under the hood…

Grrrr Macs… :wink:

I maintain my core library on a 4TB HDD and then use freefilesync to coordinate the core library drive with other HDDs (including the one I connect to my ROCK running Roon). Incremental backup is very fast (only adding/deleting/modifying the changed/new files). I do have my tag editing programs set to change the file modification dates when I edit tags so that these files have new dates and get picked up by the backup program. This is a bit of a pain because these files then show up as “recently added” even though I just fixed a tag. But I’d rather have this outcome than the changes not being backed up.

p.s. I also keep some older archives that I don’t backup, so that if something goes terribly wrong, I haven’t accidentally backed up all my recent mistakes to all my other drives.

Also, after creating a completely new backup drive with all my music (e.g., after buying a new HDD), I run it through dbpoweramp batch converter, converting all files to “TEST CONVERSION”. This decodes every file to make sure it is not corrupted. And in the case of FLAC files compares the embedded MD5 file to the computed MD5 to make sure they match. I also do this every so often with my exisiting main HDD and other HDDs, just as insurance that I most likely don’t have corrupted files on the drive. Almost never an issue here, but I recently found a drive that had a few corrupted files and an error on the drive (which I’m sure led to the corrupted files). TEST CONVERSION saved me in that regard my making me aware of this. foobar2000 > utilities > verify integrity does essentially the same thing.

I used CCC on incremental backups for years with no problems. I later moved the Core to the NAS and now use the NAS’s own incremental backup software.

Thanks for everyone’s extremely helpful comments.

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