Now That You've Ripped Your Entire Collection...

I had initially picked up a 2TB Raid-1 (redundant) drive for the music library, but I moved it out for two reasons: First, the fan was too noisy for a music system, and as Kijanki mentions above, the redundancy won't help if you have a fire, theft, or other calamity. Raid-1 only helps if your 'primary' drive in the cabinet goes down; that's when the mirror will kick in.

So, I bought two identical 2TB drives that I knew were very quiet. I'm ripping my collection to the 'primary' drive, and I occasionally use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone that 'primary' drive to the 'secondary'. I do this whenever I've ripped enough CDs that I wouldn't want to lose the time and effort.

The second drive, once cloned, goes down the street to a friend's house. Then, of course, there's the hardcopy backup in the physical CDs. I just don't know where I'm gonna put the darned things... square footage is hard to come by around here.

Should have mentioned in case anyone's interested:

The quiet drive mentioned above is an OWC Mercury Elite-Al Pro, available from macsales.com. It's about the quietest drive I've ever heard.

Carbon Copy Cloner is a great program that allows you to clone exact copies of one drive to another. It's great for the music libraries, or routine system maintenance. It runs on a Mac... don't know if there's a PC version, or not.

Rhanson739, redundancy won't help in case of controller failure that can make both disks unusable not to mention Windows itself (known to go crazy) even without viruses. That's in addition to overvoltage, lightning, fire theft etc. Another advantage of separate disk is the fact that it is unpowered. MTBF is rated for working HD and not for one in storage.

Kinanki --

A controller failure? Where's that point, in the PC/Mac itself, or in the drive(s)? And are you referring to a single RAID-1 drive, or my solution of two separate and distinct drives?

If the 'controller' is in the drives, then two physical drives plus the CD collection should be adequate backup, I would think, given that those represent three separate copies. If the 'controller' is in the system... I have any number of Macs in the house that I could swap in and out, simply connecting the live drive to the machine. (My current box is a Mac Mini with 16GB of memory, SSD drive, and software stripped to the essentials. I can move a Macbook Pro back in without flinching.)

Hope I'm not missing something. In my view, redundancy and off-site backups are goodness. Is there something better, or more secure that I've neglected to consider?

Regarding my earlier point about drives that are larger than 2.19 TB, I should emphasize that the caution about using them with older operating systems only applies to drives that are directly connected to the computer, such as via USB, Firewire, or eSATA. I'm pretty certain that caution does not apply to networked (NAS) storage, assuming that the design of the NAS enclosure supports larger drives.

Regarding cloning programs for Windows, IMO it is generally simpler and better to just copy the files, rather than creating a drive clone. Under some circumstances allowing Windows to "see" both a drive and an identical clone of that drive can result in problems, caused by inconsistencies in the drive letters that Windows assigns.

Regards,
-- Al