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

Kijanki,

Pardon my ignorance, but, how do you actually work the second drive at the office approach? I have a NAS at home with mirror drives, but, of course that is hardly protection against something really bad (like someone stealing the whole unit). I would really hate having to re-rip my collection (I am currently about half way through 4,000 cds, and this is turning out to be a LOT of work).

Do you somehow stream the data to your office hard drives or do you take the hard drives out of your home unit to take to the office, or. . . . As you can see, I am someone who needs an idiot's guide to how this is done.

I bring drive home every time I feel it needs to be updated. I alternate drives remembering which drive was updated last. I decide to update when I add more than 10 CDs. In worst case when I loose original drive and one backup I can be 20 CDs behind but that's not bad.

Larry, just buy an external hard drive having an interface that can connect to one of your home computers, such as USB, Firewire, or eSATA. Connect it to one of those computers, that can access the NAS, and use the computer to copy the files from the NAS to it. Then simply store the drive at another location, such as your office, and bring it home from time to time to copy newly ripped files onto it.

One caution in selecting the drive is that older operating systems, such as Windows XP, will have problems working with drives that are larger than 2 TB (or more precisely, larger than 2.19 TB). Before you finish ripping your 4000 CDs you'll probably find yourself exceeding that size. If you are using XP, or a Mac OS that pre-dates Tiger (which was released in 2005), you would want to get multiple external drives that are each 2 TB or less, rather than anything larger.

NewEgg.com is a great place from which to buy these and other kinds of computer accessories and parts. Here is a link to their listings of 300+ external hard drives, which you can narrow down to suit your requirements using the guided search feature at the left of the screen. Be sure to note the "More Options" link in that feature.

Best regards,
-- Al

Thanks for the advice. I have an external hard drive with 4 TB and another 4 TB for the mirrored backup (4 slots holding 2 TB hard drives). I actually quite a bit of storage because I am ripping everything to WAV files.

It looks like I will need another such unit to keep in the office.

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.