Ok so after a period of time I have accumilated 4 pre 2020 hard drives containing Band in a Box. I'm thinking of chucking them but maybe there might be an alternative use for them. I've tried to open one of the older versions to see if I could delete the BiaB program and use it as a hard drive back up somewhere but that didn't go so well for some reason.

Any Ideas?

They are regular hard drives, nothing special. So it should be fine to delete the files and use it for whatever you want.

Reformat is what I do. That cleans them good.

For my $.02 they are basically worthless.
who really needs another backup drive especially with limited capacity.
I can't even give them to my friends.

I wish PG Music could come up with some alternative product delivery system.
A "smart" download perhaps that only updates what is new on your target drive.
Seems like that could be done.

You need to find some poorer friends. A 2TB thumb drive is almost 50 dollars on Amazon. I don't know if read/write speeds are faster on old BB USB drives or not, but I use one permanently plugged in. It's larger than either of my internal drives. And I reformatted and gave one away to a local kid (middle-school age) who was very appreciative and likes it because it's harder to lose. Thanks, Peter.

They are definitely not worthless. They can and should be re-purposed for backups, even if it's only to make a copy of the children's photo album. Don't even think of 'chucking them', create backups of all of your critical / treasured files files.

My rule: everyone will suffer a catastrophic disk failure one day. Be prepared.

If you still plan on chucking them, send them to me

Notes

I'll most likely reformat and keep them on hand for a while. I have a bunch of Mac devices and I'm sure that I could use backups for a few of them.

Thanks for the advise.

A 50-dollar 2tb flash drive is likely a fake - scammers modify the drive's table of contents so that it looks bigger than it is, but it won't actually store 2tb of data. "Real" 2tb flash drives cost hundreds if not thousands more.




I was taught in college that, as a professional, if you don't have 5 copies of your file you don't have any. Backup backup backup!

I had not thought about reformatting them and using them as backup drives.... I have a bunch of them. I think I just found my new source of free SSD backup drives.

We don't use SSD's in our drives, so if they came from us they're probably normal 2.5" hard drives. Still useful, of course.

Not quite in college - that was 50 years ago - but since then I taught my students in college something much the same. As important as how many you make, though, is where they are. Keep a copy off-site. Maybe one in the car etc. And especially not all connected to the same PC at the same time. But you knew that.

Reading this thread for some reason or other (maybe its because hackers hit the whole health system here)

https://www.reuters.com/technology/irish-health-service-hit-by-ransomware-attack-vaccine-rollout-unaffected-2021-05-14/

The thought crossed my mind that sooner or later that is going to happen to someone with biab and the whole bb folder will be encrypted.

Yep using them as backup drives for only biab is also a good idea.

Absolutely! Where they are is probably more important than how many. If your house floods, and your computer and all your backup hard drives are ruined by the water, how many backups do you have left?



Scary!

At any one time we are running multi-terrabyte backups to a minimum of 6 separate incremental disks and separately the same number of imaged disks.

At least three of each of them are always stored off site, all in different locations, and all continually updated - with the offsite copies both verified and rotated.

As a programmer and developer with software that has involved more years than I wish to mention, and several millions of lines of code, I can't start again.

Years ago, a friend placed all of the photos of her baby on her computer hard drive - from the time he was born until he was about two years old. 'All the eggs in one basket'. The hard drive had a head-crash and the platters were destroyed and unrecoverable.

Whatever you do, backup, you need to. My motto: 'Be prepared - everyone will have a turn'

A friend of mine had one of those Tascam recorders with the internal hard drive. He used it for years.

A little over a year ago, the hard drive crashed hard.

Not sure if he was able to recover any of the data or not.

...Deb

Everyone should know this by now.

There are 2 kinds of computer users:

1) Those who have had a hard drive crash

2) Those who haven't had a hard drive crash yet

If you don't want to lose your data, back it up.

Apps can be replaced, data cannot.

Insights and incites by Notes

Like the outdated minimal capacity spinning hard drives many of us longtime BIAB users have stacked in the closet, the backup approaches suggested by some on this thread seem so totally last century.

There is a better way.

First and foremost ditch any spinning drives. They are dinosaurs. Give them to relatives you hate and sell them on your existing backup stratedgerie.

Cloud Backup and perhaps an additional quarterly local snapshot on some SSD gives you all you really need to feel comfortable. Do it more often if you don't trust the cloud. Big brother is really watching, especially if you've given him reason.
Trust, but verify. And do it on SSD.

If you really have TB's worth of you are far from the average user, even a music user.
In which case you need a real backup system and the BIAB drives are pretty much useless.

More likely you probably have a poorly managed file system with your user data strewn over every application folder on the drive. That is your fault and not really corrected by a bunch of tiny hard drives. Clean that mess up and it all fits nicely on an SSD.

I know many of us (Myself included) are aging tech people but there's no reason we need antiquated hardware coupled with outdated methods to preserve our most precious data.

As always do what you want. For now, Its a free country.

I can sort of see some of the point you are making, but this one:

There are many disk based backup systems available, but I wonder could you explain why BIAB drives are pretty much useless? Are they not capable of being used for backup purposes? Why would that be?

capacity.

if you need multiple TB you dont get that from a biab drive

Well, you get 2 TB from a PG Music drive with the audiophile version.

There are examples that can disprove a lot of beliefs. My first foray into cloud storage (almost last century) worked well until it didn’t. When I couldn’t access my files, they claimed that all files from accounts created on a certain week were on one server, and that one failed. No, the backup service didn’t have a backup.

Yes, the 2 TB is definitely a very workable solution for me also.

I agree about cloud storage. It can be used - but is only one method, and requires a reliance on external factors totally out of your control. If you do use cloud for backups, it should be one of the methods you use, not the only method.

Yikes!



Absolutely. Never rely on a storage solution you can't touch. Although I suppose an argument could be made if you were to back up simultaneously to Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, Amazon Drive, and/or OneDrive, but then you'd still be reliant on a functional internet connection to access them.

Any old BIAB hard drive has more storage than any of the free cloud storage services offer, and is often enough for something important. My photo collection is around 15,000 photos from over the years, and even with many of the files being fairly large RAW images, this would all fit on a spare UltraPAK hard drive, with plenty of space to spare. Scribble on a piece of painters tape and store it in my dad's garage, and it'd be a great off-site backup. A few of those would cover any important file I've ever created.

I agree with Simon. Unless you wish to undertake full image backups, the normal BiaB hard drive has adequate capacity to store photos, documents and much more.

And, lightning can strike the cloud too, as has been noted

Want SECURE data? Keep it OFF the Cloud. Keep it OFF your computer (use external drives for all your data, they're slower than internal, but buying a new computer is far simpler. And if redundancy is significant, have multiple disks to swap out so every day you back up to a different disk - three should do, then add one more as a monthly safety. There is NO SUCH THING as enough backup when it's this cheap.Keep one off-site, one in your bug-out-bag if you have one. (In California it's a good idea.) And the Cloud? Look at how many criminal cases are based on evidence recovered in the the Cloud. ANY system can be hacked, it just takes time - or luck/an insider.

I have another memory-hungry hobby - OTR (Old Time Radio ) and they gobble up a lot of disk storage space. I use the extra BIAB drives to store my thousands of shows which works beautifully.

The source archive ( www.archive.org ) is still available if I should need to re-download if I should lose anything but I have been lucky so far.

Matt mentions an important point; having too many drives connected will slow your computer to a crawl. How would I know that? lol

I had recently lost a 1TB SSD drive and all of the data on it ( including BIAB ). Moral: Make frequent backups or drive images regularly.

I would be interested in hearing that story. I am not aware that having many drives plugged in would have any affect on the computer's performance.

When I said not to keep too many drives connected, it had nothing to do with performance. I was talking about data security. I meant that you should not have all your drives connected because the same lightning strike or virus can take them all out. In other words, make your backup, then remove the drive from the computer, and store it physically somewhere else.

We are always coming up with more "modern" ways of doing things. That does not always make the new thing better. Well... it is better for the new thing company to make money from.

Single systems of backup are not safe if the information is truly important. Two or three copies on hard drives stored in different locations are an effective backup storage methods. The same could be said for cloud storage plus your own hard drive storage.

I have only had one backup hard drive failure. I thought it was important at the time but life goes on and the information on that drive was not nearly as important as it appeared in that moment.

One day you wake up and smell the coffee and understand that the stuff that is in that off site storage that you have not looked at in five years is only benefiting the guy you pay every month to store it.

I have a couple of audiofile hard drives from P G Music that I have not plugged in for several years. I should give them to someone less fortunate than myself.

I am slowly getting rid of the stuff I no longer use. My wife...not so much...lol

Billy

I should have said; searches look at EVERY DRIVE connected which can slow the search dramatically.

Oh, OK. That makes sense. Search routines index all your drives so it doesn't take all that much longer even if you add one, but yes, you are correct.

Lately, I've read from various tech forums that SSD drives (also?) have a limited lifespan. Also warnings that not all SSD's are reliable, primarily lower cost options.

Not sure how valid such articles/comments are, but something to keep in mind as you research moving to SSD's.

This is correct - I've personally killed an SSD myself, although it was a very old one, probably among the first generation or two of SSD's. I've also killed the flash memory inside USB flash drives, which can have different effects - one drive went into a read-only mode, while another shows up as a device but none of the contents can be accessed.

This makes me worry about computers with onboard SSD's, as if that fails you then have to replace the entire computer/motherboard/something expensive...

SSD's do have lifetime limits, but for most of us that limit is hard to reach, in most cases. Cheaper drives may have more problems but that is not a hard and fast rule either.

The key is research anything before you sink your money into it. I have not had an SSD failure over a couple of years use, so far, but everything fails eventually. I like SSD's for sound library storage, makes loading the instruments much faster. I use one for my system drive, windows 10 boots up in about 8 seconds on my system. I have 7200 RPM HDD's for storage etc.

Just my 2 cents as usual, your usage may vary.

The key to SSDs and HDs is backups, backups, and backups. At least two, one at home and one not in your home, say in a safe deposit box or a relative's house.

Listen to what Mario just said.

You can replace computers, you generally can't replace data.

There are two kinds of computer users:

1) Those who have had a drive crash

2) Those who haven't had a drive crash -- YET

Insights and incites by Notes

That pretty much hits the nail on the head. Backups are the most important part of managing data.

as a software developer myself, I agree that you should keep several technologies to backup your data
the cloud can and did fail for me; for maybe three years I could not access around 1500 tunes I had bought on iTunes; no explanation, no help
when they became available again I immediatly bought an Ipod touch and downloaded everything to it
SSD drives can and did fail for me and a couple of other persons; the main drive on these laptops just died, even expensive ones
2 TB HDDs are far from useless and still cost around 100 euros each
I have 5 of them since I first bought BIAB audiophile in 2016
If for some reason my 2021 BIAB fails I still can work with a previous version until the disk is replaced with a new one
If you write anything of value like lyrics you should also have several copies on paper