The Quandaries of Backing Up a Music Library

Not too long ago in a galaxy not that far away, my hard drive crashed. ...and not just one hard drive...the hard drive that I just copies ALL of my mp3's over to while I was moving data back and forth. I have NEVER had a hard drive crash. My friends have had hard drives crash, but SpinRite was always there to save them (Read previous post on SpinRite or go to GRC.com/spinrite). Well, SpinRite ran for 3 months and finally the hard drive gave up the ghost. It had a handful of sectors that would not clean up.

I salvaged 1/3 of my mp3's from the hard drive before it went completely belly up, except all of my music was now in complete disarray. I copied the music 3 times and got a cadry of different songs each time. I also tried copying off of my ipod which blew up its dbase file. I only got a chunk of songs off of it before I had to reformat the ipod. Long story short, I have only a fraction of my colleciton that I built from the days of Hotline in the late 90's. I think Hotline was mostly a Mac user app but I made the most out of it before Napster and Limewire.

I have been ignoring the issue for months now and figured finally I would make the plunge to backup my entire CD collection and start fresh...mostly fresh. I came into the ownership of a 160 GB external HD that had old Windows files on it. I finally cleaned up this drive, reformatted it to work with my Mac (sans Fat32). I toiled with the idea of Lossless encoding for quite some time but now that I have the external HD, it was a non-issue. With a few days behind me, I am almost half way done with my CDs in lossless format. I plan on taking all of the lossless version and converting them to AAC or MP3 so I can import them to my ipod. I also need to find a way to back up the external HD. I am entertaining the thought of replacing my 250 GB external HD with a 1 T HD for my Time Machine backups. Really don't help if my house burns down. I have also entertained the idea of getting Jungle Disk and using Amazon's S3 service for my music and important stuff. I will let you know how it goes.