Thanks Dstrenz,
 
Only doing normal internet connectivity and downloads, but my 15 year modem is receding into the past. Even the provider told me to get a life and upgrade.
 
Shining Light of a real Walmart and even a Staples to the far south in the remote village of Newport. Resources a bit limited on the Oregon coast unless you head over the mountains into civilization.
 
Think they speak English and can trade a few clam shells and a sack of brown rice for an ASUS modem. They will probably want to trade women in the family on top of the rice, but this is not an option for now.
 
John

Arachnaut,
 
Can unfortunately confirm that CD or DVD data discs burned and working years ago have on occasion failed. Worked at the time when they were stored and sealed in the dark. Something deteriorated outside of extreme environmental stress and resulted in data permanently lost.
 
Like the fact that a DVD stores a file that cannot be corrupted by overwriting it, but something can still go south. Not a failsafe medium by any means.
 
John

Flash drives are still not considered long term data storage.  (the are short term and always will be)  Anyone who relies on them is taking a risk and one day will have a bad experience.  I can guarantee it.
 
The DVD drives I have used cost more than $20 more like $100 or so. Anyone who relies on a $20 drive deserves to have trouble.
 
Something that many do not realise too is that all blank media is not created equal.  You can spend more on mastering grade media.  (Also burning any faster than 4x is also risky to say the least)  I have never had a failure reading CD or DVD's many many years after.  
 
Ultimately you need digital data in three (or two min) places.  A decent hard drive plus DVD backups will keep you safe and sound for many years to some.  Anyone who relies on just one backup storage format is also being risky.  The mediums themselves may not be ideal.  The trick is to have more than one.  Chances of them both failing at the same time are very minimal.
 
 

John, Your provider wants you to upgrade your cable modem? Our provider provides the modem and charges a monthly fee for it, whether we want it or not. The ASUS is a router which connects to the modem and lets you use multiple devices to connect to the internet and each other by physically connecting them to the router with cables and/or wireless.
 
Though there are Best Buy, Walmart, Target, and Staples about 5 miles from here, I usually buy things like this online. It beats going out in 9 degree weather and the prices are often lower. 

As far as backing things up goes, I use several types of media and several types of software. Acronis + Retrospect, 2 connected hard drives (one for Retrospect and one for Acronis), 6 external Hard drives via docking stations and several USB 3 Flash Drives (OS+software backups are on the Flash Drives).
 
But I don't/won't use CDs or DVDs. They are just way too small in size, way too slow in read/write speeds, besides the unreliability. My total compressed backup data (OS/Software/Projects/Samples) is 1.68 TB - about 40 Blu-ray discs. A single project would fit on one with no problem, but not everything. The original poster was asking about backing up sample libraries. I don't know how big that would be - my sample libraries take up about 500 GB. They might fit on 4 big flash drives (expensive!) or 10 Blu-ray discs, but this size needs a hard disk to be practical.
 
Any time you have to use multiple media for a single backup (2 or more CDs, etc.) you multiply the number of problems and you are less likely to ever make frequent backups.
 
Anyway, we need to figure out what works best for us - to each his own.
 
Whatever method or media you have, you should have a way to verify that the backup data is still correct. And you should verify the data once or twice a year (or whatever you feel is safe).

Anyone who relies on a single backup for important data is foolish. Simple as that.
 
We have so many options available for storage these days that the most important things should be backed up multiple times in multiple places to prevent loss.
 
CD/DVD - I stopped using this years ago when some important discs experienced disc rot (we didn't really know much about it at the time) and I lost it all. It's not a secure method of backing up data long term and if you're using single write discs, you are just contributing to the planets waste problem if what you're putting on them gets updated on a somewhat normal basis.
 
Flash Drive - I use these for transfer mostly. If I have anything stored on them, I make sure they are also stored on a HDD as well. I will say I've used a lot of flash drives and never had one fail. I find that spending a little more on a high quality brand goes a long way. I've ran my OCZ drives through the washer a couple times and they still work great.
 
HDD - I don't think this really needs much explaining. This computer I'm on now (not studio) has 10.5TB worth of HDDs in it. This includes my media server and backups. It's the most common way of storing data.
 
SSD - Until the point where they are affordable for high storage, I won't use them for backup drives.
 
Cloud - Quite possibly the greatest method for backing up data we have these days and I'm surprised no one has mentioned it. If you use a company that is reliable and secure, there is no reason why it shouldn't be used as a third backup option. If you're a MS Office 365 subscriber, you get unlimited data storage on OneDrive. Let that sink in for a moment... I pay $10.59/mo for Office and get unlimited cloud storage on MS servers. It won't be long now before other companies follow suit. Don't feel secure? Encrypt it. Very simple to make an encrypted container, load it full of whatever you're backing up and upload the container to the cloud.
 
Just some food for thought. :)

Magnetic media is the most reliable storage yes, but magnetic tape has to be baked at regular intervals or will (literally) fall apart. Magnetic media does not require any power source and HDDs are sealed in a clean room environment (never break the seal on one), which removes many environmental effects that degrade other media. Mobile HDDs are actually built to higher specs than desktop drives (most notably shock and heat specs) although they have smaller capacities. HDDs also allow for incremental backups and surgical storage/retrieval at nice (SATA3) speeds. Cloud storage goes to magnetic media and has the advantage of being off-site but the disadvantage of bandwidth (which really depends on file sizes with each pass).

TerraSin
...
Cloud - Quite possibly the greatest method for backing up data we have these days and I'm surprised no one has mentioned it. If you use a company that is reliable and secure, there is no reason why it shouldn't be used as a third backup option. If you're a MS Office 365 subscriber, you get unlimited data storage on OneDrive. Let that sink in for a moment... I pay $10.59/mo for Office and get unlimited cloud storage on MS servers. It won't be long now before other companies follow suit. Don't feel secure? Encrypt it. Very simple to make an encrypted container, load it full of whatever you're backing up and upload the container to the cloud.
 
Just some food for thought. :)

I've thought a bit about Cloud storage and agree that data should be encrypted if you go that way.
 
The problem with that, for me at least, is that this is probably the slowest method of all.
 
I can download, maybe, 5MBps at a sustained clip. For terabytes of data, this is not so feasible. Uploading is much, much slower, so I'd need some sort of continuous backup to cloud for this to work, and I don't want anything like that running on my machine.
 
Ideally, I'd like to restore stuff in minutes, not days.
 
Then you'd need a tool to decrypt on-the-fly or you need to download the encrypted file and then decrypt which would require twice the data size and who know how much more time?
 
A lot depends on the size of the data pool we are talking about.
 
I tend to prefer partitioning my data sets on various drive volumes and backing up by volume. These volumes are typically 100 GB or more in size. The smallest volume is the OS/Boot data which is about 60 GB compressed. I can back this up and verify to a USB drive in about 15 minutes and restore via boot tools (Acronis on flash using YUMI) in about 10 minutes.
 
Also, when we use the term 'archive' - how long is the archival duration? If this is US Census data or something that doesn't change, perhaps forever is the answer.
 
But if this is program data (which can change weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly via updates) or sample data (which tend to grow and change a bit more slowly) I think we only need to backup monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
Having a grandfathering policy of rotating the backup devices allows as many previous versions as we want. Since my OS backups are fast, I can eliminate restore points to reduce its size and backup the OS every week. It's quicker to restore an older version than debug a newly appearing problem.
 
Fast backup/restore speed and monolithic storage media (eg, not multiple devices for a single backup set) are key to having a good backup/maintenence process.
 
Most storage devices we have now probably will last 5-10 years. This is fine for what most of us need for audio work. Every 5 years or so we go through some radical upheavals in technology anyway.
 
In the past I used Omega Zip drives, SCSI DAT drives, 256-channel bulk tape cartridges - all now obsolete. I think CDs/DVDs are the next to go. My bets are on magnetic rotation hard drives and solid state memories for the next 5 years.
 
 
 
 

arachnautI've thought a bit about Cloud storage and agree that data should be encrypted if you go that way.
 
The problem with that, for me at least, is that this is probably the slowest method of all.
 
I can download, maybe, 5MBps at a sustained clip. For terabytes of data, this is not so feasible. Uploading is much, much slower, so I'd need some sort of continuous backup to cloud for this to work, and I don't want anything like that running on my machine.
 
Ideally, I'd like to restore stuff in minutes, not days.

Cloud backup in most cases would be used as a fail safe. I have multiple drives that I store my work on locally, but God forbid we have a fire or something and lose everything. Unless you're keeping your work in a fireproof safe that also keeps extreme heat out which will protect your drives, a third option is always good to have. Plus, eventually you might want to get rid of localized backups that are taking up space on your drive to make new ones. Cloud would ensure you can keep them without losing your life's work.
 
What I typically do in this scenario is set my backups to upload overnight while I sleep. 5MBps is actually a faster speed than I get in my house and is quite manageable once you get the hang of how you do backups.
 
When backing up work, my standard way of doing it would be to back myself up a few versions of each project and put them in their subjective folders, i.e. Work Folder > Song Name Folder > Date of Upload Folder > Files
 

Then you'd need a tool to decrypt on-the-fly or you need to download the encrypted file and then decrypt which would require twice the data size and who know how much more time?

I still use TrueCrypt for my container protection. The software itself was discontinued last May and the original company closed making claims that there would be no more updates and therefore, the program may have security issues but this has been debunked by many people and spawned others to continue development with a few newer versions based on the open source code. It takes me a matter of 1 minute to open a container and access the files though you will need to download the whole container file which is why I would put each project/song in their own container to make life easier.

I use a combination of an external 1T bit hard drive and cloud storage and use Free File Sync to back up my files to both with one click.