A Simple Backup Strategy

If you buy music and keep it on a hard drive, you need a backup. Whether you're buying digitally and all you have is a bunch of MP3s, or whether you're ripping CDs, you don't want the cost/effort (re-purchasing or re-ripping) of replacing it when your hard drive dies (and it is a when). So here's some notes on backing all your stuff up. While these notes apply to the example of a music collection, you should also add in anything else (eg. photos) that's at risk if your laptop or hard drive dies or is stolen.

My basic strategy is:

1. Keep master music folders on laptop (for iTunes) and NAS (FLAC files)
2. Perform regular backup to external hard drive
3. Stash backups off-site (family or friend's house, storage unit, etc)

I'm not going to cover cloud backup here, because it's probably not financially viable for the file sizes we're talking about (my files run to almost 1TB). Costs will come down, speeds will go up, but for now, dumping to an external drive makes most sense for me.

What To Backup

First you need to know where your files are. It helps if you have everything neatly organised into one or two directories. iTunes users, see my previous post on letting iTunes organise your music folders. I'm going to assume we're talking about a single big folder of music files.

What To Backup To

I use small portable USB hard drives (Western Digital passport), they work fine, they have some basic password protection, but anything with sufficient capacity should do.

When To Backup

As often as possible. Realistically, it's good to get into a routine of backing up every week. How much can you afford to lose if the worst happens?

Backup Scripts / Tools

While you could just do a basic filecopy of everything, this can take time. Better to just do an incremental backup of the changes.

I use Robocopy on the PC to achieve this. My script is very basic - a simple batch file. So create a text file called "backupMusic.bat" that contains this:

robocopy "C:\Users\Me\Music\iTunes" "G:\iTunes" /MIR /V

Tweak for where your files are, add extra lines for other folders you need backed up, but that's basically it. Oh, and do get the source and destination folders the right way round, probably best testing by putting a few files in a directory and backing them up, then making a change and running the backup again. You want to be confident this will work.

To run the backup, you just plug in the external drive, double-click on the .bat file, and watch it do its magic. As only the changes are copied, this should, after the first time you run it, be a very quick process.

Note: because of windows drive assignments, I got lazy and built identical "backupMusicToF.bat", "backupMusicToG.bat" copies.

Recovery

Remember: any backup you can't recover from didn't happen. Test that your strategy works by recovering the files. A simple file copy back off the backup drive should be enough.

How Many Backups

Conventional wisdom is that you want three copies of your data:

1. Local / working - your laptop or NAS
2. On-site backup - USB or network backup in case of hard drive failure
3. Off-site backup - external drive (or cloud storage) in case of fire/meteor or other disaster