Cloud-based backup for ripped media

[MajorFubar]

Although I have a backup copy of my ripped CDs and DVDs on a separate 1TB Samsung USB drive (ie separate from my NAS), I've been pondering for a while whether to invest in cloud storage as an added precaution. Has anyone here done anything similar, and if so, have you come across any problems? For example, 1TB of space on Dropbox comes at around £8pm, which frustratingly is twice as much as I need, but I doubt 500Gb, were it available, would be more than a quid or two cheaper. I already have the free Dropbox on my computers, and looking through the config options, it looks like you can move the Dropbox folder to any location. My thinking is if I move it to my NAS and shift all my content into it, syncing and backup will be automatic whenever a computer is switched on. (Though God knows how long it would take to initially upload my 650 CDs and 20-30 films; probably a week).

Good idea or a complete white elephant until cheap gigabit SDSL becomes a reality?

 

[cheeseboy]

if it's worth the money to you then go for it. No real need for gigabit connection, just that the first upload will take a while depending on the speed of your connection, after that it'll just be incremental for anything new.

 

[MajorFubar]

Yeah that was my sort of chain of thought.

On the assumption I’m the first person to have considered doing something like this (on this forum anyway), late last night I signed-up to Dropbox’s £7.99pm plan for 1TB online storage with a view to being the guinea pig. There was an option to pay £79.99 for a full year but I want to be able to opt-out as this is initially a feasibility study, so I chose monthly.

Starting just before 1 o'clock this morning I deleted all the contents from my existing Dropbox folder on my Mac and allowed it to synchronise. Next I opened Dropbox preferences and redirected its home directory to my NAS, where it instantly created a reassuringly-empty Dropbox folder. Then I dragged the entire iTunes folder into the Dropbox folder. The transfer was of course immediate because the iTunes folder was already on the NAS, and so from a file-handling perspective nothing physically moved on the drive, just a quick update to the TOC.

And so began the automated Dropbox syncing process, shortly before 01:15. I think it reported a total just shy of 15,000 items, which will be about right. My CD library runs to approx 11,000 songs all lossless, plus all the accompanying subfolders by artist, the actual library itself and the artwork. I won’t be at all surprised if this takes several days. Once everything has copied across, I’ll let you know how long it took. Then I’ll simulate a disaster-recovery scenario by disconnecting the NAS and instructing Dropbox to sync to a new location, and I’ll give you some feedback on that.

If everything goes to plan, I'll then move my ripped films into the Dropbox folder, which probably will take just as long; only 100-150 files including folders but the films are of course an order of magnitude larger than my lossless audio files and collectively are of a similar size.

Interesting experiment, if you are so inclined, of nil importance if this kind of stuff does not interest you, but all I can say is never underestimate the assurance of keeping clones of your eggs in many baskets. Dropbox isn’t really meant for backups, but at 22-26p per day depending on if you pay monthly or yearly it's an affordable Plan C if this experiment works.

 

[Dave_]

For archiving large media libraries its probably worth investigating 'nearline' solutions like Google cloud or Amazon Glacier.

 

[MajorFubar]

For archiving large media libraries its probably worth investigating 'nearline' solutions like Google cloud or Amazon Glacier.

Indeed there are no doubt various options, Dropbox is what I'm familiar with so that's what I went with, I also like that when I rip new CDs or films they'll back up to the cloud automatically, ableit slowly...I'm back home from work and it looks like it's uploaded about 4,500 items in just over 16 hours so I'm in for a long haul.

 

[Series1boy]

I've also been looking into this and I currently have google drive for my business use and it works very well. All my media devices are apple so I did a bit of searching on the web and iCloud came up which I currently use for my photos and videos, but you can use iTunes Match with up loads all of your purchased music, plus your ripped CDs and music purchased from other download sites. The big benefit with this method is test you can sync it to your iPhone, Mac, iPad, PC etc..

Has any one used this storage with iCloud and how does it compare to other cloud storage?

 

[MajorFubar]

but you can use iTunes Match with up loads all of your purchased music, plus your ripped CDs and music purchased from other download sites.

Regrettably it doesn't do that, and to be fair to Apple, they don't claim that it does. If it did I'd be laughing and the 100-page long complaints thread on the Apple support forum would never have started. Which is one reason why I've chosen to use a different provider to store all my lossless rips (I don't have any music purchases, and I doubt I ever will). I *could* have used Apple iCloud Drive and paid to increase my storage to 1TB, but there are two reasons why I didn't:

(1) Apple charge through the nose for storage: £14.99 a month for 1TB compared to £7.99 that Dropbox charge. I know I defend Apple a lot on here from the ritualistic haters but I'm not quite that stupid or devoted.

(2) Typical with Apple's inflexible eco-system where you do it their way or not at all, certainly on the Mac you cannot force iCloud to store the iCloud drive anywhere except your profile's Home folder (specifically it sits in <home>/Library/Mobile Documents), which completely defeats the purpose of what I'm trying to achieve.

For those who are interested, the sync continues: 3,297 files remaining, having started at approximately 01:15AM on Friday morning. I was wrong when I said there were 15,000 files to upload, actually it was closer to 23,000. I don't know where I got that original work of fiction from, but it was past 1AM when I started the upload, I had been up for about 19 hours at that point and the world was starting to blur.

 

[Series1boy]

but you can use iTunes Match with up loads all of your purchased music, plus your ripped CDs and music purchased from other download sites.

Regrettably it doesn't do that, and to be fair to Apple, they don't claim that it does. If it did I'd be laughing and the 100-page long complaints thread on the Apple support forum would never have started. Which is one reason why I've chosen to use a different provider to store all my lossless rips (I don't have any music purchases, and I doubt I ever will). I *could* have used Apple iCloud Drive and paid to increase my storage to 1TB, but there are two reasons why I didn't:

when you go into settings, music and select 'learn more' it takes you to the link below which contradicts what you say that apple don't claim to say:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/

has any 1 tried this?

i agree with you on costs and I find apple cloud space to be overly priced too.

 

[MajorFubar]

when you go into settings, music and select 'learn more' it takes you to the link below which contradicts what you say that apple don't claim to say:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/

has any 1 tried this?

i agree with you on costs and I find apple cloud space to be overly priced too.

I am a Match subscriber, it doesn't do what you think. It scans your library and matches your content on a song by song basis to songs in the iTunes store. If it finds a match, what you stream via Match is the song from the iTunes store, at (I think) 256k AAC. If it doesn't find a match, it uploads your song (again, as a 256k AAC, I think) and it streams that back to you. Trouble is the matching process is fundamentally flawed, even if all your library is iTunes downloads. Even when it finds the right song, it's not necesarily the same master from the same album. Various artist compilation albums and Greatest Hits albums are the worst offenders, the volumes and EQ can be all over the place 'cos you're not necessarily hearing the album from your library, plus they can be different edits and mixes. One of the most high-profile cockups is with the Beatles Mono Box Set, where Match returns a jumbled mixture of songs matched against the stereo versions in the iTunes store and the actual mono versions from the user's library. There are thousands of other examples.

There is no method to force Match to simply upload your library and not attempt to (mis)match your content. And even if there was, it wouldn'tbe suitable for my purpose here because the songs are still being resampled down to 256k AAC.

 

[Series1boy]

when you go into settings, music and select 'learn more' it takes you to the link below which contradicts what you say that apple don't claim to say:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/

has any 1 tried this?

i agree with you on costs and I find apple cloud space to be overly priced too.

I am a Match subscriber, it doesn't do what you think. It scans your library and matches your content on a song by song basis to songs in the iTunes store. If it finds a match, what you stream via Match is the song from the iTunes store, at (I think) 256k AAC. If it doesn't find a match, it uploads your song (again, as a 256k AAC, I think) and it streams that back to you. Trouble is the matching process is fundamentally flawed, even if all your library is iTunes downloads. Even when it finds the right song, it's not necesarily the same master from the same album. Various artist compilation albums and Greatest Hits albums are the worst offenders, the volumes and EQ can be all over the place 'cos you're not necessarily hearing the album from your library, plus they can be different edits and mixes. One of the most high-profile cockups is with the Beatles Mono Box Set, where Match returns a jumbled mixture of songs matched against the stereo versions in the iTunes store and the actual mono versions from the user's library. There are thousands of other examples.

There is no method to force Match to simply upload your library and not attempt to (mis)match your content. And even if there was, it wouldn'tbe suitable for my purpose here because the songs are still being resampled down to 256k AAC.

Thanks for exsposing, sorry explaining the imatch... 🙂 I was going to give it ago but it sounds like it's not what I'm looking for. I'm going to try and do what you have done but with google drive . How's your uploading going, are you there yet?

 

[MajorFubar]

No need to apologise, it's all about learning from each other. Uploading is still slogging on, but the end is in sight now: 1,666 files left, says approx 31 hours. I thought about Google drive, might be what you need. I knew Dropbox was what I was after, with its facility to specify where the actual Dropbox folder lives, this allowed me to effectively move the dropbox folder to my NAS.

 

[Series1boy]

No need to apologise, it's all about learning from each other. Uploading is still slogging on, but the end is in sight now: 1,666 files left, says approx 31 hours. I thought about Google drive, might be what you need. I knew Dropbox was what I was after, with its facility to specify where the actual Dropbox folder lives, this allowed me to effectively move the dropbox folder to my NAS.

I need to look into this and see if google drive will allow me to change and set the file path of the folder to sync up with. All my music is on WD NAS drive with iTunes on my Mac book running the show.

my google drive is currently set to sync to my Mac which I need for my documents so I may need a completely different solution such as drop box or something simular, because I don't think you can set multiple sync file paths...

 

[MajorFubar]

Quick tip that I think will prevent future grief for me, I've removed the Dropbox application from the start-up items on my user-profile. In other words it will be up to me to open Dropbox whenever I want to sync it. This is because if it starts up before my computer mounts the NAS drive (mounted by a script in my start up items), it'll almost certainly throw an eppy because it won't be able to access its Dropbox folder, and having linked to it again afterwards, I don't want it resyncing all 23,000 files again, think I'd lose the will to live.

 

[Series1boy]

Quick tip that I think will prevent future grief for me, I've removed the Dropbox application from the start-up items on my user-profile. In other words it will be up to me to open Dropbox whenever I want to sync it. This is because if it starts up before my computer mounts the NAS drive (mounted by a script in my start up items), it'll almost certainly throw an eppy because it won't be able to access its Dropbox folder, and having linked to it again afterwards, I don't want it resyncing all 23,000 files again, think I'd lose the will to live.

yeah good idea!

 

[MajorFubar]

Small (late) update: the backup to Dropbox completed some time during Thursday afternoon, so effectively it took around 6½ days or thereabouts to upload 291Gb. Quite slow really considering my upload speed according to speedtest.net is potentially 10Mbps, but quite possibly there is a (deliberate) bottle-neck at the dropbox end.

Already this backup has proved useful because right on queue and for no reason whatsoever iTunes decided it was corrupting its library file tonight (the actual xml file, in my case a 26Mb file). So opening iTunes gave me nothing but an error. Not the end of the world but does take about an hour to make a new one. So I downloaded the backup from Dropbox, which took 10 seconds or so. Not the deliberate test I had intended but I proved in principle this works.

 

[Dave_]

Small (late) update: the backup to Dropbox completed some time during Thursday afternoon, so effectively it took around 6½ days or thereabouts to upload 291Gb. Quite slow really considering my upload speed according to speedtest.net is potentially 10Mbps, but quite possibly there is a (deliberate) bottle-neck at the dropbox end.

By default Dropbox is smart and will rate limit to 75% of your upstream bandwidth, they don't on the downstream by default iirc and you can change it in Preferences.