Best external hard drive to store PC ripped music

Hi Sufentanil (Michael),

I've got a Mac Mini with a 2TB drive nearly filled up, largely with uncompressed music. I've got a couple 1.5 TB drives hanging around, and would like to use one for backup with Time Machine. Will Time Machine compress things down so a 2TB drive of mostly uncompressed music will likely fit on a 1.5 TB drive?

Thanks.

Software designed to back up and restore the files on your hard drive is a different thing from software designed to organize your music collection, and both are independent of the brand of hard drive you use.

If what you're interested in is having easy access to your music files then software like iTunes or J.River would let you manage those files easily.

I use "dbpoweramp ripper"....pretty simple. You just tell it where to save the files (in a music folder on your harddrive).........it also gets the album cover for you, and puts it in with the music files.

What could be more easy than that?

Dave

check out Drobo's. They back themselves up, and have near infinite storage, with hot swapable SATA hard drives. Very cool, love mine.

Peter,

The short answer to your question is "not likely". Ideally the Time Machine drive should be significantly larger than the data to be backed up, because Time Machine keeps interval backups after the first one that allows you to go back in time and see how the data looked at a given moment (before you make a particular change, for instance). The larger the Time Machine drive, the further back in time you can go, as it starts erasing old history when the drive fills up so it can continue to provide backups near the present time.

Michael