Backing up iTunes

Ive been using silverkeeper to back up my itunes music to an external drive, this always worked great, first time takes a lot of time ( 450 gig ) , but after that over fw 800 it would add only the newly added music in like 8 minutes tops, in that time the other 450 gig's are checked aswell. Unfortunatly Silverkeeper does not work with Leopard ( Yet ).My last lacie drive came with retrospect lite, but that does not work for me at all, it looks likes it zip's the backup in some kind of way, that's not what i want, i just won't to sync my 2 drives so that only added files are being added to the backup folder.

I have been using ElephantDrive (www.elephantdrive.com). Its been great so far. No capping of upload speeds. Instant access to all files that have been uploaded even from other computers. And they recently released a Mac client which I have been playing with. Pretty neat.

I just purchased a WD 1TB MyBook (for backup only) to back up 450g of music, plus 200g of Pro Tools/Logic Sessions. Last night I tried using Retrospect to back all of this up and I keep getting an error saying that there is a 2g limit to the transfer. This can't possibly be right. Does anybody know about this? It's driving me freaking nuts!

I have this fantastic solution;

I drag the iTunes folder onto an external hard drive like there's no tomorrow...

Ka-Pow!

The online storage option seems tempting, but I have at least three LaCie Hard Drives–two 250 GB Porsches and one 500 GB Value Line model (One Porsche is for iTunes exclusively, the other I am thinking I will use for off-site storage) while the Value Line LaCie I used to backup both iTunes and my computer with Retrospect.

I think that, short of an EMP, I should do pretty well.

If someone steals my equipment I can probably bounce back relatively quickly, though the trauma of the event itself will probably weird me out for awhile.

SuperDuper and Drobo.

Consider how important your iTunes library file is in addition to music - play lists, # of times played, favorites, podcasts subscribed to, pretty much EVERYTHING.

True Story!

I launch iTunes the other day and it says, "I'm sorry, but your file appears damaged"

It starts over with an empty file!

I look at the date/time of the original, launch CrashPlan, and restore the version 15 minutes before it became magically "damaged".

I was back up and running in less than 2 minutes.

I love CrashPlan! (Disclaimer: I work there - but this really did happen to me.)

I have a 1 TB drive that's partitioned for both Time Machine backups of my MBP's internal hard drive and my media (music, movies, etc.). I have a second 500 GB drive that I use with Carbon Copy Cloner to duplicate the media partition of the 1 TB drive. This allows me to keep my Time Machine updates going constantly, and keep my iTunes library close at hand. I'll do backups of my media to the second 500 GB hard drive weekly so everything is always in two places, but I only need one hard drive in at a time. The 1 TB is an enterprise quality drive inside an enclosure with Firewire 400/800/USB/eSata so I have a lot of options depending on what I'm doing. Most of the time I keep it in my FW800.

kakapo said...
"BTW - Time Machine is worthless for backup for a larger HD (750 GB to a 1 TB drive) will not work. "

What makes you say that? Just make sure the drive you're backing up to is larger than the amount that you want to back up. Time Machine won't re-write everything, it just updates.

If you have a 1TB drive and it's mostly full, you can use Time Machine to back up to a drive (raid) that's 2TB or even 1.5TB and find that it does a full back up and then gives you lots of room for iterations of files.

It's really not the size of the drive you want to back up, it's the amount of archive and updating you'll need.

I've had my iTunes Music Folder on the same external drive for years, never broke!

a backup doesn't hurt, though