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Mac Leopard, iTunes, apple lossless best backup

Hi,
I'm downloading all of my disks to my dedicated music server, all 450 CDs and it is taking forever. My question involves backups. What is the best way to back up _all_ data.

I want to include all the Apple lossless files created for the tracks, playlists and almost as important as the Apple Lossless files, the album artwork I had to assign to about 30% of my CDs.

My layout is:
Macbook w/ 120 GB, -- where the applications and user account
External Drive 1 - Firewire 500gb drive -- all the lossless files
External Drive 2 - Firewire 500 gb drive -- where the backup should be deposited.

Should I just use disc copy for Drive 1 -->> Drive 2 and then manually lay onto Drive 2 the iTunes library files for the user account that created all the files? If so, what directory are all these files located?

Or should I "trust" Time Machine and when Drive 1 fails in the future figure out how to get "all" the data back from the backup drive?

Thanks.
nycjdc

Showing 3 responses by jdillard

jdillard
5 posts
 
What's wrong with Time Machine?
jdillard
5 posts
 
I see. To date, I haven't had any problem with it - knock on wood - although I thought my HD was going to burn up during the initial backup (about 500GB of data). It [i]will[/i] back up anything you ask it to. I have two internals and one external which all back up to a separate 1TB external.

I'll admit that I do have a separate backup just in case, though I haven't updated it since upgrading to leopard.
jdillard
5 posts
 
Well, personally I'm not concerned about how the program uses the disk space. What I mean is that I'd use a dedicated disk regardless, and I'd keep it filled with as many incremental backups as I could. So why not let TM do it for me? In fact, it's much more efficient than if I did it manually, since I would back up entire folders or drives as opposed to the individual files that have changed. So I essentially end up with more backups in a given volume. Plus, after 48 hours it converts the older hourly backups to single daily ones, then after 30 days, the dailies to monthlies.

Your other points I confess I don't really understand. The whole point of TM's journalling is that it is always in sync, and that you can easily restore a single file very quickly to any specific point in time. If I accidently delete all my playlists, for example, I just go to the iTunes folder, click TM, pick the point in time I want to go back to, highlight the file and click restore. The advantage, apart from ease, is that I can choose a backup from less than an hour ago rather than last night (or three weeks ago if I'm doing it manually). Of course, you can also do a complete restore from scratch if you need.

I can see someone being wary of using TM because its new; but as for how it works, I can't imagine a better solution.
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