Interesting article…
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If you lose data because an HDD (or any other medium) dies on you, you only have yourself to blame. At a minimum, there are two things you need to do when archiving data:
- Keep multiple copies.
- Check each copy periodically to see if it hasn’t ‘rotted’, i.e. read it, hash it and see that it stayed the same. If it failed or changed, make a new copy from another that’s still good, ideally on newer media.
Of course, the best option nowadays is to keep it in the cloud (i.e. with storage professionals).
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Interesting , I use SyncBack Pro so it reads the Source , Reads the Destination and syncs by difference . I sync probably every week
This builds in your READ requirement
For Roon I have an SSD in the NUC , a copy HDD in my main PC and 2 x USB HDD External
Any data (audio & video) drives in the main PC has 2 x External USB HDD copies
I should home one off site in case the house burns down.
Cloud storage is good but it would take for ever to copy my videos etc
I guess I didn’t post this for us to worry about our own collections, but more to envision the possibility that some digital masters may be lost if record labels aren’t careful. Kinda scary.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that anyone would accuse record labels of being particularly competent in any sense. This is still heartbreaking:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html
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Indeed. It’s in the same vein.
I too use SyncBack Pro but it’s not fail-proof. A while back I had an issue where a bunch of files on my primary disc were corrupted (during a crash, I’m guessing). At the time I was unaware that any of my audio files were messed up. So the next time I ran SBP, it dutifully copied all these corrupted files to my backups. So I was left with corrupted files everywhere before realizing it. I eventually tracked them all down and replaced them but it was a PITA. That’s another nice part of Roon, it’s ability to scan for corrupted files. I run that after every import.