I dedicated a one terabyte (one million million – a very big number) disk to this task. It took many days to complete the task of transferring my recordings to disk – so much time and effort that I decided it prudent to occasionally back up everything to a second disk. "Just in case..." Two days before I left on vacation I began experiencing strange problems with my musical playback. I didn't suspect the disk because I had just made a couple of significant changes to my software environment: I upgraded to the new Mac OS "Snow Leopard" and that required I update the software that provides my house-wide service. Perhaps the frantic last minute plans for my vacation clouded my reasoning, but I was very fortunate in backing up everything just days before. Eventually, the primary disk failed. Had I not been backed up, I would have lost all that effort.
Hardware failures are like that: tricky little bastards that have little concern for our convenience and that can mask their symptoms so as to lead you astray. Computer hardware fails... always: it is just a matter of time! In particular, disks, which have sensitive mechanical components, are likely to fail most frequently.
Digital storage in my household has become a critical service. Not only is my music stored, but my photos and movies, and increasingly important documents. These are all too precious to lose. There is too much to conveniently back up, except to another disk, which itself is vulnerable. Only the fool thinks lightning doesn't strike twice with computer hardware.
There is a good solution, one that is well-known to the business world: RAID, or "redundant array of inexpensive disks." With RAID, data can be spread across multiple disks in such a way that if any one of them fails, the original data can be rebuilt from the remaining disks. The simplest approach is simple mirroring: the same data is automatically written to two disks, giving you instant backup. A better approach is spread the data across multiple disks with enough extra information, automatically calculated, so that any one of the disks can be removed and the original data can be recovered from what is left over.
RAID disk units are essentially specialized computers in themselves, so this solution costs more than just disks, which are quite inexpensive these days. It is an insurance policy and you have to ask yourself just how much that data is worth to you. The thought of going back to CDs (which, incidentally, can also fail) is more than I can bear. I have lived a couple of weeks without my home music "service" and I want it back!
Fortunately, such disk solutions are becoming less expensive and more readily available. Most are implemented as "NAS," or "network attached storage" devices that connect to your computer through Ethernet; indeed, one NAS can service a number of computers on the network. What I really wanted was something that basically looks just like a disk that is plugged directly into my computer. I want it to be fast, very easy to configure, and virtually invulnerable. While on vacation I met a gentleman to gave me a great lead: Drobo. I'm a bit surprised that I was unaware of this new company, since I have been employed in the computer industry for over a quarter of a century. A unit configured with four 1 TB disks will give me 2.7 TB of protected storage. If a disk fails, a status light informs me and all I have to do is replace it. The unit will rebuild everything and life goes on.
This raises the question of how much storage do I realistically need. I originally assumed that I would need 1 TB to store approximately 1,000 disks. In fact, it took only about a third of that storage, only about 300 GB. Although I am steadily adding to my collection, it took me almost 30 years to get to 1,000 CDs. So, that original 1 TB is probably more than sufficient for my lifetime! A Drobo unit with four 500 GB disks would provide 1.8 TB of protected storage, probably sufficient for all my needs. However, I'm putting everything else on that device. Digital photos and especially movies accumulate quickly and I hate to throw anything away. Disks are inexpensive, so it is better to think big.
I wonder how quickly I might grow my collection to 2,000 CDs, now that I'll have sufficient and safe storage for it!
