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Mac Leopard, iTunes, apple lossless best backup

Hi,
I'm downloading all of my disks to my dedicated music server, all 450 CDs and it is taking forever. My question involves backups. What is the best way to back up _all_ data.

I want to include all the Apple lossless files created for the tracks, playlists and almost as important as the Apple Lossless files, the album artwork I had to assign to about 30% of my CDs.

My layout is:
Macbook w/ 120 GB, -- where the applications and user account
External Drive 1 - Firewire 500gb drive -- all the lossless files
External Drive 2 - Firewire 500 gb drive -- where the backup should be deposited.

Should I just use disc copy for Drive 1 -->> Drive 2 and then manually lay onto Drive 2 the iTunes library files for the user account that created all the files? If so, what directory are all these files located?

Or should I "trust" Time Machine and when Drive 1 fails in the future figure out how to get "all" the data back from the backup drive?

Thanks.
nycjdc
sidssp
1,077 posts
 
I think you have asked this question before. Have you tried SilverKeeper from LaCie? It is free and simple. Don't use Time Machine to backup iTunes tracks.
jax2
3,031 posts
 
I'm not sure if it'll work, but within iTunes there is a "back up to disk" command - not sure it will work to an external disk though - worth a try as you'd likely be backing up all the data since iTunes is doing the backing up. I know it works to burn a set of DVD backups. Have you considered a RAID? If not, here's a relatively economical solution, but it would make the drives you've already purchased, well, er, redundant (sorry). It uses internal drives - you'd have to pull them out of the housings, which I'd guess you probably don't want to do. I don't know that I'd be comfortable with TimeMachine's reliability at this point. Early on there were lots of reports in the Apple forums about folks losing data via TimeMachine. Mac's already come out with at least one update for 10.5 already. I don't know if that addressed any of the problems folks were having. Anyway, I'd wait to make sure they sort out all the kinks there. You may want to check out this thread though the poster's problems have more to do with WAV files, and sounds like you are using AppleLossless, which don't have the same properties (metadata can go with the AL files AFAIK). Not sure why your backup is going slowly though...you should be able to drag and drop one hard drive onto a second and, via a fast interface like Firewire or USB 2.0 it should go relatively quickly. USB 1.0 might take a while. I copied a 300gig drive via USB 1 and it took several hours. Copy the drive and disconnect the original drive and make sure the music and metadata all shows up in iTunes. It's a good idea to copy your itunes folder as well as it has all data that is the structure of your library. That file is much smaller than your actual music files. Back it up whenever you add music to your library (as well as the actual music). Some folks store their music natively, within the overall iTunes folder in the subfolder "itunes music". If you store on external drives your actual music is on the external drive, and the stuff that holds it all together is in that iTunes folder. You can rebuild the library if you loose the iTunes foler, but it's bit of a PITA and takes a bit of time. Per the thread I refered to above; I know enough about this stuff to be dangerous. Regardless, hope that helps.

Marco

PS TimeMachine technically is acting to some degree, just like a RAID.
jdillard
5 posts
 
What's wrong with Time Machine?
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