itunes backup suggestions

I keep getting shot down on this suggestion due to cost, but really the best, and in the long run cheapest way to back up your iTunes is via Drobo. Look it up online. It is basically infinite storage with built in back up. 4 hot swappable SATA drives. I have my iTunes directly pathed there, and have the Drobo hooked up via Droboshare (yes at additional cost) to my network as a network resource. If you read how it works, 3 of the 4 drives could fail at the same time, and you would still keep all of your data. Any time there is a problem with a drive you are told by the Drobo to swap it out. You do this without turning anything off or losing any data. Works great, easy to set up, and you can put any size drives in it you want. I currently have 4 1TB drives which gives me 3.2 TB of storage, the rest dedicated to backing itself up.

Subject is also at the following link:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?icomp&1226982607&read&keyw&zzi+tunes+backup

The Drobo suggestion is a great one, especially if you want constant backup without having to think about a backup schedule. The only downsides are the cost and that you have everything committed to one physical device that can be lost in a burglary or fire.

A simpler, cheaper way to do it is to plug another 1 TB drive into the Mini, either Firewire or USB, and use a backup application like SuperDuper to clone your primary drive on a regular schedule. You can buy a good quality external 1 TB drive from LaCie or Seagate for $100-120, back up every Saturday morning and likely never lose more than a week's worth of ripped files.

The advantage of having a separate physical drive is that you can keep it in a separate location when you're away from your system for awhile. As always, the choice comes down to which set of compromises you're most comfortable with.

Are you sure about that M'texas? According to their website having four 1TB drives gives you 2.7TB of storage with .9TB for redundancy, not 3.2TB of storage, and there's no way you could lose 3/4 of your drives at once and reconstruct it with a single dive.

If you are not in a big hurry the next edition of OSX will have data redundancy built in so it will manage all of this for you at a fraction of the price of the Dobro. You can buy four 1TB drives for around $400 and the 4TB Dobro is over $1,000. I would buy another 1TB drive and copy your existing and then wait for Snow Leopard to come out later this year.

My solution was to do what you suggest at the end or your post, Iwalker198: attach a second drive to the first. I have two 2TB drives daisy-chained to my Mac Mini. I set up Time Machine to copy one to the other, but I keep the second drive turned off and only connect it periodically when I've made some additions to my iTunes Library. This has been about as painless as can be.