Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

stop scaring me

brb encasing my offsite backup in a Faraday cage with UPS

coincidentally i had to replace a failing drive in my RAID this weekend, at this point i think it's a RAID of Theseus

True, I know all that, but I use a Synology format and when one drive failed and I accidentally hosed another, it was still able to reconstruct. But yeah the other drives are in separate devices. I’m backed up pretty solid (phrasing) I think.

Synology's backup to USB disk feature seems pretty good. Of course i haven't had to restore yet.

all my media files are on an external drive that ONLY gets backed up remotely via backblaze.. but i don’t feel i’m living that dangerously w this? chances that BB has a problem at the same time the drive does seem infinitesimal?

all my media files are on an external drive that ONLY gets backed up remotely via backblaze.. but i don’t feel i’m living that dangerously w this? chances that BB has a problem at the same time the drive does seem infinitesimal?

good job i'd say. do that cost much?

The idea is that restoring from online backup is slow, so good to have a local backup to restore quickly from, and only resort to the online backup when both of them fail.

Tracer I’m glad that your post had a duplicate for backup

lol you can’t be too careful these days

maf it's 10 bucks a month

Siegbran otm, but nothing on that external drive is time-sensitive. unless you count S03 of reservation dogs. my mac mini's internal drive gets backed up via Time Machine as well as BB

where does the mac mini get backed up to - the same external drive with your media?

i think backblaze is probably fine for your use case, it doesn't sound like you are a power user. you can google aroundfor 'backblaze restore experiences' and find plenty of horror stories natch. apparently backblaze needs to see a file at least once every 30 days or it will delete it. shouldn't be a problem if you're backing up every night but if you have an external drive you only plug in once every couple of weeks could be a problem. i'm assuming you don't have so much data that you'd want backblaze to mail you your data on a drive, which is a service they offer.

where does the mac mini get backed up to - the same external drive with your media?

I think it's supposed to mean that even though (in most configs) a disk in the array can fail without you losing data, you could still e.g. accidentally delete a directory and then you wouldn't be able to restore it.

― stet, Monday, January 15, 2024 5:25 PM (yesterday)

i'm getting way ahead of my skis here but i *think* if you have your synology NAS set up in btrfs you can use the snapshot feature to mitigate this, which works kind of like time machine.

“not a power user” rip tracer hand, was good to know you

so your internal drive is important enough it gets its own local backup drive, but your external media drive doesn't? it's all just commercial media on that drive, yeah? no home movies, precious photographs of your kids, etc.? xp

all my photos, many precious memories yes

“apparently backblaze needs to see a file at least once every 30 days or it will delete it”

i cannot believe this is true

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze and wrote a lot of the Extended Version History functionality on your client.

...

Now, in this Version History (30 days) if you unplug an external hard drive for more than 30 days, not only can you not retrieve your files from that hard drive's backup, but if you plug the drive in again you will need to upload all of the files again. After 30 days, Backblaze treats it as if the drive will never return and purges the files from the backup in the Backblaze datacenter.

fun eh?

from reading around, i think the caveat is that if your entire system is disconnected from backblaze for more than 30 days, you'll be fine as backblaze will simply preserve the last backed up state. but if for whatever reason you connect part of your system back to backblaze without the other parts - i.e. let's say you are a laptop user and are traveling with your laptop but not with your external drives, and your laptop is backing up to backblaze every night but your external drives remain at home - then you will be thrilled to learn about the 30 day rule and even more thrilled to learn that you can pay them more money to extend the 30 days to 1 year.

also you know, a power surge can fry every drive in the NAS along with the NAS itself.

― the absence of bikes (f. hazel), Monday, January 15, 2024 8:22 PM (yesterday)

so the apartment i've been living in for the past few years is pretty stable power wise, i can't recall ever having a loss of power. well, guess what happened over the weekend - apparently the circuit breaker that my synology lives on decided to go crazy and would power flicker if anything on that circuit were turned on/off, such as a power-hungry 10-watt led bulb. my synology lost power and when i turned it back on after replacing the breaker it sent me a strongly worded email to buy a UPS.

Morphy ran into a problem and was shut down improperly. This could be caused by power failure or other reasons and may result in severe data loss. Therefore, we highly recommend using an SNMP or USB UPS to protect your device and data if you don't already have one installed.

the synology is on day 3 of data scrubbing but hopefully i'll be ok. i'll be picking up a UPS soon.

fun eh?

ah i see. that does suck. in my case my external drive is always plugged in and mounted so i don't think i would run into this but good to know about if I ever decided to back up a portable drive that i only plug in from time to time

I've got two 4-bay NASes, once which serves as a quarterly backup device which I store at my office and then I have a set of hard drives that serves as my onsite backup. Got about 35TB of data and not much upstream bandwidth so the online backup service is just for my main system and personal files - it won't work for the giant archive of audio and video files.

to answer the question from the original revive

i had a decent surge protector on my computer, but after finding out the electricity to my place sucks (it's undervoltage, apparently, to an extent that my computers were crashing periodically) i grabbed a UPS... it's definitely given me a lot more peace of mind during the ice storms. i didn't have a full power-loss but i had lots of flickers.

i am trying to figure out how to get my NAS documents folder to backup to the cloud, like, all the stuff i've written... it's more difficult than i thought it would be. honestly at this point if i lose all my audio and video files i'm copacetic about it. i lost three years of my curated music library and playlists and ehhh i don't actually give that much of a fuck. i've gotten into the "embrace the impermanence of all things" mindset lately.

Hmmm this looks nice if my AirPort Express ever dies

https://www.wiimhome.com/wiimmini/overview

i'll buy anything with wii in the name

Those sound good. Was considering it for my father in law til he made clear enough he's really not too fussed about the whole music on computers thing.

I'm still on Logitech Media Server which isn't the easiest to recommend. But would say give it a look before shelling out for Roon!

Not sure why it took me so long to discover Prism. I LOVE IT. Finally I can stream all my music to my phone. As close to zero setup as you can get.

ooh tell me more

Prism is a 3rd party iPhone app for Plex.

Yes and it also integrates your Apple Music library as well, afaict? Like, my playlists sync to Prism, which is what I want. idk what Plex’s playlist support is like these days but the last time I checked it was terrible.

ah no my bad, Apple Music is available via Prism but only locally eg, what’s on yr phone.

Is there any way of accessing yr Apple Music library outside the local network?? (I can’t even access it INSIDE the local network actually… “Home Sharing” just literally doesn’t work. It appears on my phone but does nothing when you choose it)

it's time to deprecate apple music. apple obviously doesn't care about it

yeah. i mean Prism is actually allowing me to use my phone to control the Apple Music library that’s on my computer but eh??

i guess i can recreate my playlists on Prism but it would be nice to have a standards-based ecosystem so that i know i won’t have to do it all over again for some other app once Plex gets bought by like Tiktok or something

i'm saying apple doesn't want you to have an apple music library on your computer anymore. they want you to subscribe to the (other) apple music that's not on your computer and give them money! time to move away from the apple music (on your computer).

yeah that’s what i’m kind of in the process of. feels kind of sisyphean doing my playlists again but i guess i should just give in to impermanence

btw the 'standards-based' thing you're looking for might be satisfied by looking into airsonic/subsonic compatible servers and players. airsonic is an open source fork of subsonic and seems to have an active community. but setting these things up probably involves a lot of pain. so ymmv. as i've stated before itt i use navidrome but have been too lazy to open up my NAS to the outside world to allow streaming.

This whole fragmented thing around music libraries is really annoying, I now have four music library applications to manage, each with its own playlists, it's a total shitshow.

- I've got Apple Music (the app not the streaming service) since it's the only way to sync music to iPhone/iPad natively, but it can't stream outside the home & the integration with AppleTV is terrible, it's also really limited with things like multiple genres/multiple artists/release types/etc, so:
- I've got Plex since you can stream remotely, Plexamp is a great Phone app & Plex is the only half-decent music player on AppleTV
- I've got Navidrome since the web player is easier/better and handles things like compilations a bit better
- I've got EngineDJ since I'm forced to use it to sync with my stand-alone Denon DJ controller, unsurprisingly as a library manager it's shit

On my PC I still use the Zune software to manage my digital music library. Somehow it still works, though last update was in 2011, and of course all the support and help links are long-since broken.

Zune lifers are the new 78 collectors (and I love them both)

Haha. It's true. I still use a Zune (my third) and if I can find a refurbished one when this one finally dies, I'll probably get another.

iTunes is still chugging along well for me. I even have an iPod Classic that still syncs properly.

It's kinda funny but telling -- I've noticed over the last couple of months a weird little bug in iTunes/Music that doesn't allow me to easily collapse individual tracks from promos into one album anymore with one step. (Importing rips is simple and works just fine.) It's not the end of the world and has only affected a couple of things, it just takes way longer to do it since I have to track by track. So I've been chatting every couple of weeks with a higher level Apple support person who is as puzzled as I am, and from context I definitely know now that I am among the very VERY few users using the program that way anymore (ie, to organize things in a home library, utterly separate from Music either as resource database or center for streaming), and that the bug was so obscure that I appear to be the first one to have reported it from what I'm gathering, though I've seen a couple of comments from people on the discussion forums indicating they've had similar issues. At one point the support person, knowing I was a music writer per our chat, called me a 'professional' user and I got a sense that was distinct from just about everyone else who uses it. Odd feeling!

We are the annoying ones, the edge cases, the power users - starving hysterical naked