The Data Migration Thread

yeah, I know. this is more for the convenience of not having to go dig through 200 discs to find some file or show or album.

all music collecting is ultimately just a pain in the ass and hoarding digital files is just as pointless (if not more pointless) as hoarding CDs.

yeah but if you have a hard time coming around to the "get rid of anything I'm not listening to" position, it's easier to have a hard drive filled with useless shit you don't need than it is to get rid of closets & attics & basements full of actual CDs.

Revive - a year on anything digitally related is akin dog years...

I now have over 600GB backed-up to two drives + 200 CDRs. Oberservation:.

1. I've had two HD failures in the last year (not the Caviars) but I was able to recovery 99% of everything with recovery software (Stellar Phoenix). This first recovery kept my USB-tethered HD spinning for about 6-weeks. Use of a USB 3.0 or SATA connection may have helped (but who knows given the black magic involved in deep level HD scans) but I wouldn't know because I was unwilling to turn off the machine until the scan was completed.

2. Adhere to your category sections. I didn't want to go too genre-centric. Since I'm not an academic, I've found it useful to make my categories more general. I know use the following:

Alt Rock
Folk - Country - Blues
Electronic - Ambient
Hip Hop - Rap
Jazz
Rock - Pop
Metal - Noise - Avant
Soul - R&B - Funk
World

These get me on the right track pretty quickly when looking for anything in general or particular. I probably have a couple other sections for holiday or kids music, etc., but the main categories have really help keep me from getting bogged down in the minutia.

3. When I archive an artist with a sizable catalog - i don't need everything. I've assembled a 1 CDR "best of" for artists like Nilsson, the Stones, Springsteen, etc, where I've weeded out a bunch of individual tracks. I found it also to be good exercise for examining the full arc of an artist's career. I've yet to exceed the space of a CDR with a condensed discography and a hi-bit MP3s.

3. When I archive an artist with a sizable catalog - i don't need everything. I've assembled a 1 CDR "best of" for artists like Nilsson, the Stones, Springsteen, etc, where I've weeded out a bunch of individual tracks. I found it also to be good exercise for examining the full arc of an artist's career. I've yet to exceed the space of a CDR with a condensed discography and a hi-bit MP3s.

This is a great thing to do, for the reasons you outlined, as well as the fact that some artists lesser material simply isn't worth the effort to get into.

I don't understand backing up to CD-R or DVD-R.

they last longer than your average hard drive (if you store them under reasonably good conditions)... I haven't had a failure yet, but if I do I sure will be glad that I have a reasonably dependable and cheap form of backup.

really? a lot of cd-r's longevity rates are much shorter than the manufacturer's advertised length. I suppose you need to buy quality brands.

yeah, the only failures I've had (like 3 out of 1000) were with noname brands. having said that, I should note that I have yet to purchase a secondary external, so a lot of what I have is ONLY backed up on DVDR or CDR. one thing at a time, it took me forever to rip them all. a 2.5 TB external will provide another layer of protection, then I think I'm good.

My mom is an archivist and they have an acronym - LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe). I've tried my best.

you need an off-site backup. I would back your stuff up to two HDs at least (plus the primary one you use daily), and keep one at your mother's house or somewhere else, in case your house burns down (knock on wood).

lol I just put my hard drives in the fireproof/waterproof safebox when I was in Peru this last month!

and I definitely plan on giving the next external I buy to a friend.

I was pretty guffed to find out that some fireproof boxes aren't really 'fireproof' - that is, they're rated as being able to withstand X temperature for Y time, but if the fire exceeds either then there's no guarantee. ;_;

while this thread is up, if anyone has any advice about how to get FLAC ID3 tags to work on a Cowon player using a Mac it would be very appreciated. I just got a new player today and I can see the folder structures (i.e artist/album cause that's how I have them labelled) and the track title, but the tag fields are blank. I use xACT for FLAC coding but I've never been able to figure out an ID3 interface.

This is a great thing to do, for the reasons you outlined, as well as the fact that some artists lesser material simply isn't worth the effort to get into.

― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Friday, April 29, 2011 12:54 AM (3 hours ago)

I also try to include at least one track from even the poorest of releases as it maintains the visual integrity of the discog as well as putting some the "sour" times in context with the better material.

Also, i neglected to include the obvious "Classical - Opera" category; I doubt, however, that any of my beautiful Columbia Masterworks and vintage Blue Angel slabs of wax will ever be turned into "1's and 0's".

http://www.backblaze.com/ seems like the obvious answer here. surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet.

> FLAC coding but I've never been able to figure out an ID3 interface.

FLAC uses its own built-in tags, not ID3 tags as such. but anything that rips to flac should know that.

not sure about mac but on linux there's a thing called metaflac which will list and modify the flac metadata. command line tool though, so you'd probably hate it.

(actually, i hated it, until i wrote a wrapper for it based on vorbistagedit which presents tags as a file that opens in vim and rewrites the corrections when you quit)

don't recall having a problem with flac metadata on my old Cowon M5 but that was some years ago. my current iRiver LPlayer chokes on ogg tags which aren't ARTIST=whatever - the ARTIST bit needs to be uppercase...

I back up to backblaze, but i've only got 75 gigs of music. 600 gigs would take a bit of uploading.

Check out Tag: http://sbooth.org/Tag/

CD-Rs may have lower failure rates, but you could just buy an additional hard drive. A 1 TB drive is like $80, that's 1,400 CD-Rs or so. Which I think would cost way more. Worried about both drives failing? Buy a third. I have had much more of a problem with scratched CD-Rs not able to be read.

Online back-ups are impractical with large stax. I'll stick too HD -- wish that Tape back-ups were still around at reasonable prices (why the hell does the hardware for LTO-5 cost $1K and up ?!?).

The cloud will save all? Maybe for the pedestrian listener, which means the products they make won't fit the high-volume customer.

I have yet to have a burnt CDR flake out. I keep them all in individual paper sleeves and out of direct light. Some are 8 years old and have been played dozens and dozens of times. Also, I only use Taiyo Yuden media which in my experience, has been nothing less than bullet-proof.

Got two backup disc drives today. Now I'm copying 300 gigs of vinyl/tape rips (in flac) to the first new one. 1.5 TB of CDRs will come next. Then I'm gonna take the backups over to a friend's house and leave them there. Finally, some serious redundancy - my old LaCie drive is almost dead.

Kind of a bummer that these new 3 TB drives only work with Leopard, I don't wanna upgrade (and don't even know if I can on an odler G4).

skip, thanks SO MUCH for that Tag recommendation, that program does everything I need it to. My Cowon portable recognizes any JPG or GIF as cover art, so I don't need to tag that art but just throw it into the folder.

Since I started this thread flac hardware support has gotten much better, I wish my Cowon understood shuffle play without repeating tracks but other than that I am totally happy with it.

Revive.

I'm still putting all the digital stuff to hard drive, and the only wrinkle i've added is that i'm now also saving pertinent video (mp4) files that i typically nab from youtube via keepvid.com. My WD Caviar Black drives are still holding strong, but i try to minimize the number times i even turn them on (all hard drives accessed via docking stations). So, in practice, i amass new stuff on my laptop and handle all the tagging and conversions (MediaMonkey is still my mainstay, but version 4 is not nearly as nice as version 3 -- even if the getting the album is a bigger pain) there before sending them to my external archive. The thing i like about this approach, is that my entire archive sets right next to my computer and have easy access to the entire stack simply by powering-up my docking station.

I doubt the new "Pono" format will have any bearing on my current methods, but cheers to Neil for giving a damn.

I will finally rip the remaining 250 or so CDs and reorgnanize my library into a single unit as opposed to what's-on-the-iPod vs. what's not. I've embraced the cloud - my own personal cloud using Subsonic - and accept having less than everything in local storage. Now that I can access my library via my TV, it's even easier to enjoy it all!

I really do need to create an off-site backup, though.

still rolling with the same setup - rip to the Mac, tweak or track it using Amadeus if it's a vinyl burn, back all audio & video up to an external, and back that up on a drive in the basement once a month. I need to get a new drive and copy the data from the last two years or so for offsite backup.

as far as trends, I'm wondering if 24/96 audio is gonna get popular in hardware/player options, I definitely see more of it out there in the wild. my listening is all still either flac, vinyl, or cd.

the guy who makes the xACT flac program for Mac said that the program would no longer work on older versions of OS X (10.5 and below I think), so I reluctantly upgraded my OS a notch to 10.6.

what about video? perhaps this isn't the thread for that, and i should create a new one, but i've been thinking a tiny bit about what i'm going to do with movies going forward.

like, i don't have any physical discs, and i'd rather acquire as few as possible, so it's prob gonna come down to between streaming, renting, and buying, all digitally

poss wrong thread

Videotapes Are Becoming Unwatchable As Archivists Work To Save Them

The Magnetic Media Crisis

Videotapes Are Becoming Unwatchable As Archivists Work To Save Them

― sleeve

except for leonard part 6, which was unwatchable from the beginning, am i right folks?

sigh

new 5TB hard drives are great, tiny and USB-powered, but the one I have is read-only on all devices except the one it was installed on. so if my laptop dies, the HD is frozen forever. I haven't had the time to dive into the manual to see if I can add permissions, or make it open to all.

they really have us on the hamster wheel, they're prepping us for the 'convenience' of streaming by poisoning the stability of all physical media -- it is not unintentional.

Milton Parker otm 12 years ago

Never did follow up on my earlier post -- I did make that big radio station donation I discussed, back in 2011. A great relief, really. The digital collection has migrated a couple of times since to larger hard drives and I currently rip all discs I get w/Apple Lossless, which is also my Bandcamp download standard.