Does anyone have suggestions for a less expensive external drive for storing music tracks. I like to keep all drafts just in case I want to review something older or steel a track from and earlier draft.

I'd like at least 3TB. I won't need any of the files to run BIAB or retrieve RTs/RDs/etc. Speed is less important, I have 2 TBs on my CPU and still have 1 TB available. But memory fills up fast.

Thanks.

Andy, if this is for archival storage I would not go for the less expensive. Generally less expensive means shorter shelf life. At least that has been my experience.

My solution was to get sufficient local storage for current projects and then sign up for unlimited cloud storage.

I then move things I don't need 'right now' to that storage where it is backed up and managed for what I consider a reasonable fee, considering everything else I get with the service.
For instance I can freely share the space during projects.
As an example, the image below shows some guitar tracks I received from JazzManDan (now calls himself MusicStudent here) back in 2010 .. and I know they are still available.
The JonWax folder contains extremely rare tracks by MC Breed right before his death in '08 (the tracks are actually still being fought over legally .. so sad because nobody will ever hear them and nobody makes any money)

Anyway, it's all there and I don't have to worry about it. I can also access it from anywhere at any time.

Thanks, guys.

RH, which Cloud service do you use?

I have Carbonite on my biz machines but the DAW isn't connected to the net.... so I use a standard external 1TB.

You can put a lot of music on 1TB.

When it fills up, buy another one and archive that one.

I have yet to fill up a 1TB with all the stuff I have. You can easily put hundreds of projects on a drive.

I jumped on a 1&1 offer that was $5/month for unlimited storage years ago.
Looks like it is around $8/month now .. which is still very cheap for unlimited storage (for years).
https://www.1and1.com/web-hosting

They also include website hosting and other features, and the hosting has been nice, but after many years I have realized the storage (and backups) alone were well worth the price.
I would guess other suppliers have similar offers. I just ended up at 1&1 years ago and have had no reason to change.

Thanks, guys. I should really go thru the files and cull out any repletion or useless song versions, but I've done that before and then wished I still had something that was on one. So, I'd like to just store everything, maybe for a year or two just in case.


I have other music files and some videos, etc. My CPU has the 1TB left, which is good for daily tracking, but my other external is 2 TBs and it's getting close to full, plus it's older technology and slow as heck, which is fine for true storing, but if I'm expanding might as well take the plunge. Looks like Seagate has models in the $150 range for 5TB, and unless they've degraded, their equipment is well reviewed.

Just thought I'd get ideas from the knowledge base. Thanks for all the input!

I am a little bit suspicious of using very large hard drives for backup/archiving. You can end up with all your eggs in one basket gone! I use a dual drive NAS in Raid 1 mirror mode for my archiving. If one drive goes down you can replace it and all your data is still intact.

Also since it is a network device you can access it's content from anywhere on your local network (or even further afield)if you wish.

I am a little bit suspicious of using very large hard drives for backup/archiving. You can end up with all your eggs in one basket gone!



partition the drive that way you will be safe..!

Big John, I share your concern. But partitioning a large drive won't help if the drive fails; all partitions will be unavailable without costly recovery services. Maybe instead, buy a bunch of little drives, and store them in different places, especially off-site?

Matt

I was just about to post the same ,yeah what was I thinking.

It actually puts me in a position I was in a long computer time ago.


What do you do back up your back up or store on ..cloud, That might go down.?

What do you do, If it was paper we would file it .

Digital is so hard when it comes to, Forever more.

Thanks Matt

My approach, right or wrong, is to keep two backups of all my files. One is on another computer, off-site. The other is a portable hard drive in my car. Various critical files like my compositions and recordings are stored on additional flash or portable SSD drives, and DropBox.

My first experience with the cloud was a bust. After paying them for several years, the service failed. Apparently everyone whose account was created in a certain month lost their account on one bad server. It seems they didn't keep a backup.

Partition the drive will only give you more 'virtual' drives. That alone is certainly not enough to protect you or guarantee you from drive failure. All your eggs are still in the same physical basket.

I believe that everyone will get a turn at a drive failure, sooner or later. You must have a guaranteed recovery path.

USB external drives and Windows 10: Got me a backup RAID 3TB drive, 2 partitions, and all of a sudden windows 10 decided it would just see it as an unallocated 3TB thang. Never had such problems with windows 7 ..... But found AOMEI partition assistant (partition recovery) to be the hero of my day. But i just got me a 3TB drive to backup my backup drive LoL. -F

I recently had a drive failure on what I call my Apps-Data drive (all the sound libraries, VST/VSTi files, etc). I back it up every week (although it doesn't change much, so my backup system doesn't take very long to go through about 900GB of stuff). Installed a replacement drive, copied the files overnight, and was back up and running the next morning.

And Trevor is right. Partitioning a single physical drive doesn't protect you, because you still can lose the whole drive (taking all the partitions with it. Partitioning may help if something caused some data corruption within the partition itself, but not from physical hardware failure.

Best bet if you use a big drive (and I've got 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB external drives) is to buy enough additional storage to back everything up, and then do so on a regular basis. If the data on the drives change infrequently, it doesn't take long at all to back everything up.

That'd be me then. I have 2tb in my PC Tower that runs BB and tons of other stuff. But i have anold 250gb in there too
that stores my finished projects and an external seagate drive that gets a back up - well you never know when - -

That's a lot of good stuff for consideration. It'd be amazing to cross them like hybrids. The RAID system (how cool is that?!), separate, external HHDs ( have that now, one for biz, person, and for music), Cloud...prayer.

I really need to go thru it all and do a spring cleaning.

Anyway, I bit the bullet and ordered a new CPU yesterday. 512 SSD, 7TB, i7, 32BG RAM. I wonder if I can rig it so the 5TB HDD in my existing CPU could still be available for storage........why not I guess. It's networked.

You techie people have it made.

Not a fan of RAID. Too easy for a failure to take out both/all drives.

RAID allows the system to rebuild the failed drive .. unless you're doing it wrong.

We use RAID specifically for that purpose in production servers; if a drive fails, we can yank it out, insert another and it rebuilds.

Unless you are talking about the RAID controller itself.
They are more reliable than the drives, so that's pretty rare for one to go bad .. though I have seen it happen. But even then the drives were OK, just needed a new RAID controller.

Not understanding why you wouldn't like RAID (?)

That's reassuring you like it, Bob, since you are using it currently. My experience with RAID is quite old. Thanks for sharing.

FWIW, if you are seriously concerned about backups, services like 'rackspace' have been very reliable for data storage in my experience. I personally use redundancy here combined with 1&1 storage off-site (I got a very good price from them many years ago and simply have had no need to change for personal use). But my professional experience with rackspace (and a couple other providers) has been positive.

very true, had that situation .F

Also the hard drives in the RAID array are formatted as EXT4 which with a third party app can be read by Windows. So when I upgraded to larger drives in the NAS I was able to take one of the old hard drives and copy it's contents back into the larger capacity NAS from my PC.