Advice on storing large music libraries

[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!

[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.

[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!