A colleague has 420 Gig of music files acquired over quite a few years. Currently all is stored on a 1Tb external disk. I have recently related to him how one of my external disks has just "died" (fortunately it contained nothing of any consequence that was not backed up elsewhere). However, my colleague is now worried because he would be more than peeved if he lost all his music files.

Personally my mind boggles at the thought of how much is in 420 Gig of music files - say I speaking as someone who has at the most a few Mb of music . . . . and I still have the 78/ 33 rpm records from which they were copied.

So, the question is - what do folk recommend as the safest/ best way to store 420 Mb (and increasing) of music files?

My colleage's inclination is to buy a pack of 100 DVDs and then to put those away very safe off the premises.

Snod

DVD's become questionable after about 4yrs
And its the hassle of moving them from that meadia in the future.

My Advice is to buy a 500GB External Drive
And copy it to both locations.
That would be the cheapest option as no hardware can be 100% safe.

Or the more expensive option would be to buy a NAT Box
which allows you to access the data on the drive but also has RAID built in. (there not that cheap to set up) you will in most cases need to purchase the internal hardives x2 for that saftey side of things. And becuase it has RAID which allows the Dirves to mirror what the other does would mean that when more music is added then its mirrored to the second drive.

But all in all buy a 500gb - 1TB External Drive.
Note : They may advertise them as 500gb or 1Tb but in reality there not so if he has 420GB of Music he will need more than a 500GB Drive.

Hope that helps.

i agree with this

but as Mark also says, 500gb doesn't mean 500gb so i'd get another 1TB one, copy everything over, and keep the second one in a secure place.

I bought a Verbatim portable 320GB HD from Asda for £45.00 and it only has a 278 GB data capacity after format - Just as a rough guide!

I read what you say guys - and Thank You.

However, in the end I think the answer will be cost driven. 100 DVDs cost around £20 and a 1Tb drive is £60-70. My colleague is an invalid on benefits and he will need to take the lower cost option. That said I have some free disk space (as a couple of smaller hard drives rescued from machines that have gone to the tip and now caddy-mounted, and some 50gig of cloud space I never use) and I will offer those as back-up of back-up parking spaces for the more important audio stuff [in my colleagues case that means his Pink Floyd stuff).

The way prices of hardware reduce as the years progress I anticipate that beforfe long (!) a 1TB drive will be the sort of thing to find as a gift in a cornflakes packet or MacDonalds and solid state USB drives will be of comparable size. My colleague can then consider moving his collection back of DVD.

Snod

i get what you're saying, but DVD's have a habit of being unreadable sometimes despite them being formatted correctly...

1TB hard drives you can get for as little as £40 if you shop around, ie ebay or amazon or if places have special offers on.
a very quick browse on gogole shopping finds this http://www.google.co.uk/products/ca...mp;tbm=shop&cid=2675970132544225700# 1TB for £51 or there's the option of 2TB for £85...

Dabs have got 500GB's starting at £44 odd, if that's any help

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