External Drive Help


Hi All,

I had a surprise yesterday when my external drive - a Western Digital 1TB My Passport suddenly refused to recognise certain of my music folders (high-res and DSD downloads). I also received an error message - cyclic redundance check. Fortunately after running tools and check disk, the drive started working again and I re-imported the missing music files in JRiver.

This external drive is connected to my Baetis Server and plays music (mainly CDs ripped to FLAC using DB Poweramp) through the JRiver software. However, I am also starting to download more music over the web and this issue got me thinking as to how I might improve my back up system as these downloads have no physical media back up like a CD.

Currently as per Baetis` recommendations, I rip music to a separate external drive on my laptop using DB Poweramp or I download directly from websites like HD Tracks - in each case this music is transferred to My Passport External Drive. In addition, every time I download new music I manually copy across these files to a Seagate 4TB back-up hard drive.

Do you think I could be doing anything better in terms of handling files? I suspect it becomes a matter of how much redundancy I am prepared to pay for but interested to hear from people with more experience. It would also be great to be able to configure the Seagate back-up drive to copy certain files automatically from the My Passport drive but not sure this is possible.

Thanks in advance

James
vicks7

Showing 1 response by chadlesko

Recently I got into the digital arena of music, being mostly a vinyl listener.

For storage I have a Netgear ReadyNAS 102 connected to a switch at my stereo. This resides in the basement at the opposite end of the house from my backup. Backup is connected via USB to my router (the 102 is wired from the same router). It isn't an option to have backup via WiFi because there are too many users in the family. The router is on the first floor of may house at the opposite end. Therefore my NAS and it's backup are as far apart as possible and connected to the same LAN.

The only fear that remains is a whole house fire. I think of that as rather slim possibility, but possible. For somewhat foolproof backup I am considering a second ReadyNAS 102 to reside at an offsite location (work). Some of the latest NAS units have easy to setup software to encrypt data and talk to one another over the internet.

This is not an ad for Netgear...I just like the same brand equipment since the software tends to speak with one voice. However, I made one crucial error...only important to my setup, which is that the latest ReadyNAS software doesn't work with Minimserver software that I would like to employ. I've learned to work around it but not what I intended to do (personal problem...not related to this topic).

My biggest point is to keep it simple and determine what you think is realistic. I like a twin disk NAS with 1 backup in a remote location.