So I have built up a decent size music library, mostly mp3 files, that I currently have saved on my desktop computer's hard drive. That hard drive (1TB) is running, and I'm looking into options. Thought this might be a good place for some advice on managing a large (600 gig) music library. Note that this is just my 'active' music archive, and it doesn't include any video content.
Any help / advice is welcome. Looking at possibly a new laptop computer, a new desktop computer, maybe an external hard drive to store the music.
Thanks!
First of all I hope you have a backup of that!
On a side note I highly recommend an always on online backup system since in my experience, people don't always backup regularly. Backblaze is a good option for that and good price as well.
If you are looking for local storage, I would recommend getting a NAS. This way you can access it without having your computer on and can use it as a source library for a Sonos system should you have one or are considering that. Another advantage of a NAS is that an external hard drive could die and then be lost but a NAS could be set up with redundancy, so you'd be able to swap out a bad hard drive relatively easily.
Here is where you can start researching....
https://www.synology.com/en-us/products?tower=ds_j%2Cds_plus%2Cds_value%2Cds_xs
Depending on how old your computer is you may want to consider getting a new one as well. Mine is getting slow and is quite old now so I am planning to replace mine later this year.
Thank you Chief! Your recommendations are much appreciated. I definitely keep backups, but I do want to automate all of this to make it more efficient.
You're welcome!!
Please let me know what you end up doing. I may need to make some changes to my setup as well.
I currently use an online backup service that runs on my PC which backs up all of my files continuously and also occasionally manually do a full backup of my computer. But I am overdue on that so I am planning to do that this week. One can never have too many backups IMO!