I’m looking for thoughts about backing up my music library. At present, my music (which is on SSDs) is about 400 GB/18,000 files. The Roon database (on another SSD) is about 2.85 GB. The music seems to be growing by roughly 4-6 albums a month, mostly as hi-res downloads (which seem to run 1.5-4.0 GB). The system is Win10 Pro x64.
Maybe once a month I back up everything (by robocopy, across a network share) to an HDD. I keep 3-4 iterations of full backup on a local Win10 Pro x64 system different from that where Roon runs.
Maybe every 2 months I backup remotely: To Microsoft OneDrive (full backup) and to Acronis Cloud (incremental backup). OneDrive backup takes maybe 36 hours; Acronis, maybe 2 hours (the initial, full backup took maybe 36 hours).
I wonder what other people do to preserve their music.
I use a RAID SSD setup, and Dropbox (1 TB account).
Also have my collection on a couple of standard (unplugged/stored) HDDs.
I haven’t added any new music lately, and mostly listen to my old stuff, OR access new material via Tidal. I have about 15,000 files. Some hi-res duplicates, and multi-channel fiac files, but mostly 16 bit 44.1 stuff.
In the last 6 months I have grown tired of having a draw full of disconnected offline backup disks (and cables, wall warts, etc). Now backing up 500GB Roon library to G-Suite ($10/month for 1TB) and BackBlaze B2 ($0.005/GB/month = $2.50/month for 500GB). I use Syncovery for automated/scheduled uploading to the two storage providers - it has support for both G-Suite and BackBlaze.
I do automatic incremental backups to each cloud provider twice per week. After the initial hit of uploading 500GB to each of the cloud providers, the incremental updates now take up very little time and bandwidth per week.
I suppose I do indirectly, I connect them to my PC to do the backup so any hdd issues would show as I do the sync. They are both actively read from and written to most days
Also I occasionally connect one to my Cambridge Audio CXN streamer for use when my network is disconnected in thunder storms. Strictly I know this isn’t then a back up , for the pedantic
I do information security as a career, and here are some backup suggestions:
Make sure you keep your backup media “air gapped” from your server/PC. In other words, don’t leave your external drives connected unless you’re doing a backup. This will protect your backup media from the effects of most malware.
Make a “golden” copy of your music and store it outside of your home. Cloud backup can work here to compliment your own physical backup.
Save your original media in a secure location. I have about 3000 CDs that I keep in a nice climate controlled room. To save space, I have them on spindles.
Test a recovery from your backup media once a year, just to ensure it works.
I run Roon primarily on my PC with headphones but sometimes run it off of a NAS when listening in other rooms.
Backup strategy:
Clone PC drive to external everyday (I use Macrium Reflect which can do a delta clone and is fast after the initial clone).
If my PC drive crashes I can just swap disks and get a new drive to clone.
Bvckup 2 sync to Music folder on NAS as a backup and to run Roon off of NAS.
Arq backup to Google Cloud Storage
Bvckup 2 and Arq run continuous and my backups should only be out of date by 2 hours or so.
The only drawback to this setup is the metadata is not synced on the NAS.
