[Macworld]

Post your comments for Back up media files here

[2020hindsight]

I'm a bit obsessive when it comes to backups.
Time Machine backs up the vast majority of data, including my iTunes music, to a Time Capsule. Every day of the week I also have a scheduled backup or synchronisation of key folders, each with at least two versions. So for my iTunes music there's the original, the TM copy and two others.
As for movies and TV programmes, they're all on external disks, synchronised weekly with other external disks.
Oh yes - my critical data (personal finances etc etc) also have another remote backup via the wonderful Dropbox utility.

[Coffeeboss]

I also have a few TB drives to back up client work, music, fonts and have my itunes set to use the externals, but I have one Question? Actually this is one I have been trying to answer to friends as well. Where in the heck are all the Photos kept in iPhoto and how does one back all of them up? Is there a missing App that is out there for this? Ok I know about the library but there is no way to export 2400 photos and Name it to an external?
I should do more homework on this but thats what Apple is for. To figure it out for me right?
John in Charlotte

[GrtJzzMn]

"Of course it’s a good idea to back up purchased content—hard disks fail eventually and Apple, unlike eMusic, doesn’t let you re-download your content"
I have to say that this comment is not true. I had my library lost when my computer shut down and deleted my external hard drive. Unbelievably an iTunes rep was very kind but to respond back to me by email many times to ensure that my library was returned. But the amazing thing is that they returned every item I had downloaded from both my iTunes Acc, At least one year previous to what I had asked to be returned.
Now wait that's not it. Because the customer service rep wasn't able to fixe my problem with a matter of hours, but in fact over a couple of days, they offered me three song downloads and a video download free of charge for both accounts.
Now I am not saying that it is not important to backup, after that I instinctively did just that. But ever since that day, I always admired the service and understanding that I had received from Apple Support.
Maybe I should have mentioned I had up too 200GB of data lost. I think that is saying something for Apple indeed.

[Link33]

I still use Dantz Retrospect and backup everything on my HD. My music sits on the internal source drive and my movies sit on my external backup drive. I don't backup much video because I don't purchase that many iTunes videos. I have bought around 20 GB of video from iTMS and backing up that small amount onto DVD isn't that much of a burden.
If I could afford it I would have a giant internal drive being backed up to the external and I'd keep video backed up to, but right now I have more time than money and I would rather re-rip video than pay to archive/back it up.
I will say that I have mixed results with having an alias pointing to the movies folder on the external drive. There was a time when I was importing the digital copy of a movie we bought that had iTunes returning an error during the process. I renamed the alias "Movies" to "Movies2" with iTunes running and not only did it create a new folder called "Movies" it also kept up the link to the old location. I love that iTunes watches when stuff moves around in the Finder so I don't have to re-add those files.
Cheers!
Link33

[dbutenhof]

I lost an external hard drive with a lot of Final Cut Express files, DVD images, labels, and such. Painful. I recovered all the DVD images from the burned DVD-R media, and scanned the labels to reprint if I need to. The raw DV is a loss but I probably won't ever need most of it. Except, of course, for the nearly complete year of old family videos I hadn't quite gotten around to putting on a DVD, which I'll need to re-capture and edit from the tapes.
(I let Prosoft's Data Rescue II run for over a month on the dead drive, without any luck, before finally giving up to install 10.5.6. I later found out they've seen successful recoveries that took much longer than that. One of these days I'm going to set up a dedicated system that I can leave running "indefinitely" on that old drive to see if it finds anything.)
I replaced that drive with a Newertech Guardian MAXimus RAID-1 array to protect against future disk failures. In this case, I'm not so concerned about recovering deleted or changed files; I just don't want to lose the data again.
I use a 1 Tb Time Capsule to back up 3 of the iMacs in our house, and have my own private 1 Tb external drive for my own Time Machine backups of everything except the video disk.
Something like the Voyager with hotswappable 2 Tb or higher drives would allow me to do rotating offline backups of everything, which would be nice. A Voyager bundled with a 2 Tb drive is priced close to what I paid for my last external 1 Tb drive, and its definitely worth considering.
I used to use Retrospect with a VXA-1 tape to back up all the systems, with off-site rotating media. The problem is that the price for high density tape (drive and media) is outrageous for home or small business/hobby use. The VXA-1 was too small to be of real use, and when it finally failed I didn't try to replace it.
It's the "offline" and preferably "offsite" part that I really miss. I'm somewhat concerned about failure of my Time Machine disks; but the chances of them and the original iMac disks failing at the same time are small. I could fix that by replacing the Time Machine disks with MAXimus arrays; but an off-site backup is still safer.

[kirkmc]

Apple doesn't publicize it, but I've heard anecdotal stories of people who were able to get their libraries re-downloaded. But this is only once; they won't do it again if you lose stuff. And it's all or nothing; they don't let you redownload just one album.
In any case, I wouldn't count on them. You need to back up, as I said, not just purchased content, but everything, which can save you a lot of ripping and tagging time if you had to re-create your library.

[DocNo]

I have a drobo for protected, redundant local storage. I'm protected from hardware failure, but not if my house burns down. For that, I am in the process of using Mozy for archival backup for my media (thousands of digital pictures) and important data files.
I also use Backup that comes with Mobile Me (hate the name change) for iTunes purchases and my documents folder since it's free (as long as you subscribe to mobile me) and works well.

[kubomon17]

i back up everything with time machine. thats all the peace of mind i need.

[dbutenhof]

DocNo said:

I have a drobo for protected, redundant local storage. I'm protected from hardware failure, but not if my house burns down. For that, I am in the process of using Mozy for archival backup for my media (thousands of digital pictures) and important data files.

Huh. I didn't know about drobo or mozy. The drobo disk appliance sounds cool, although there's not much technical detail about precisely how it manages its mixture of striping and mirroring. The "beyond RAID" description suggests it mirrors as much as it can and when you exceed that capacity it lights up yellow and drops or reduces redundancy; but isn't exactly clear on how. I'd be slightly concerned about trusting its "intelligence" too far implicitly. (I don't mind a little setup, and I'd rather trust my intelligence than my disk drive's intelligence.) And there are cheaper hotswap RAID-1 enclosures, like my MAXimus, that also require no configuration; and a lot less implicit trust.

A quick google search showed a lot of mixed reviews on mozy; both for the software clients and for their archival strategies and management. Have you tried to restore? Did you get everything back that you thought you'd backed up?

After all, this is an article on backups... mozy and drobo are both "on topic".

[barskey]

I moved my iTunes and iPhoto libraries to a Drobo. This way they're protected from a hard drive failure. I use Time Machine to protect me if I do something stupid like delete my libraries. But since I have digitized most of my movie collection into iTunes, I excluded the Movies folder from the Time Machine backup - it is about 200GB right now.
The last step in my strategy is to get an external drive (or two to rotate them) to keep a copy of my iTunes and iPhoto libraries at an offsite location, either my office or a safe-deposit box. This will protect me if something happens to my house.
One of the best things about the Drobo is that as my library grows, I can just add/replace drives and can keep going. If I had a 1TB RAID system, I would need reformat the entire thing in order to make it larger. This would mean I would need someplace to store the 1TB before I reformatted. That is time/effort I am happy not to spend.

[ChrisLJ]

I've been thinking of getting a Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition and hooking into my Time Capsule via USB to store my music.
The 2 Terabyte model has two 1 TB drives running in RAID 1 mirror mode. If one fails, you can easily replace it and the unit will copy to the new hard drive.
I have over 1,500 CDs and a lot of iTunes and eMusic downloads, so I want something redundant. Wouldn't want to lose all of that.
NewEgg has them for less than $250 here:
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136281

[TowerTone]

I have a 250 GB internal that is backed up to a 500 GB external, which is partitioned at 300 GB for Time Machine and 200 GB for SuperDuper (bootable) via Firewire 400.
My next setup will include an off-site catastrophic service such as Carbonite and a 500 GB Time Capsule for Time Machine, leaving the current external for SuperDuper and a media server.

[cabelaj]

I back up all of my iTunes to an external hd. What I do I have 2 folders dedicated just for iTunes. 1 is the old backup. And the second is the future back up. I go into the main iTunes folder on the computer hd and take that folder and drag and drop it into the new folder on the external hd. Once that gets done ripping off the computer. Then I go back and delete the old backup. I keep the old back till the new backup is completely done. Just incase shit hits the fan. Then I atleast have somthing