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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
computeraudiophile
18 posts
 
I actually created an automator script that opens iTunes and copies all stuff not copied before to a backup folder.

I have also found time machine to work just fine.

- Chris
Computer Audiophile | Turn Down The Silence

http://www.computeraudiophile.com
jax2
3,031 posts
 
What's wrong with Time Machine?

Just check out a few of the discussions here. Nothing is "wrong" with TimeMachine as a concept. But if you go to the Apple discussion forums you will come across a whole lot of reports from early on where folks had lost data from relying on it. There has also been problems with Disk Utility formating FAT32 drives at that time. Again, Mac has come up with an update since then, so it may all be sorted out at this point. If TimeMachine is working, that's fine. I don't know if it can be set to back up an external (non-boot) drive with your music files on it. Certainly if you've put them on your boot drive it will back them up, but I don't do that. As I understand it, it backs up your boot (startup) drive that has Leopard on it. I've been using it successfully thus far on my g5 tower, but I've yet to have to rely upon the backup. My suggestion was to give it time to prove itself out. It's a great feature, don't get me wrong.
computeraudiophile
18 posts
 
"I'm not sure if it'll work, but within iTunes there is a "back up to disk" command - not sure it will work to an external disk though"

This is only for backing up to DISC not DISK. I wish it worked for both.

- Chris
Computer Audiophile | Turn Down The Silence

http://www.computeraudiophile.com
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.
sfar's avatar
Ag insider logo xs@2x
sfar
1,352 posts
 
If you haven't upgraded to Leopard there's a great $28 application called SuperDuper that makes backups simple and painless. It has a very intuitive interface and will do anything from incremental backups of a single folder to creating a bootable mirror image of your system drive. There's a free trial version available. I've been using it to back up to a pair of external drives and am very impressed with the ease of use and functionality.
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