Advice on storing large music libraries

Started by sillyboob, Jan 03, 2022, 02:07 PM

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sillyboob

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!
Cuz it's been so long since someone shattered me.

ChiefOKONO

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.

sillyboob

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.
Cuz it's been so long since someone shattered me.

ChiefOKONO

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!