itunes backup suggestions

The Drobo suggestion is a great one, especially if you want constant backup without having to think about a backup schedule. The only downsides are the cost and that you have everything committed to one physical device that can be lost in a burglary or fire.

A simpler, cheaper way to do it is to plug another 1 TB drive into the Mini, either Firewire or USB, and use a backup application like SuperDuper to clone your primary drive on a regular schedule. You can buy a good quality external 1 TB drive from LaCie or Seagate for $100-120, back up every Saturday morning and likely never lose more than a week's worth of ripped files.

The advantage of having a separate physical drive is that you can keep it in a separate location when you're away from your system for awhile. As always, the choice comes down to which set of compromises you're most comfortable with.

Are you sure about that M'texas? According to their website having four 1TB drives gives you 2.7TB of storage with .9TB for redundancy, not 3.2TB of storage, and there's no way you could lose 3/4 of your drives at once and reconstruct it with a single dive.

If you are not in a big hurry the next edition of OSX will have data redundancy built in so it will manage all of this for you at a fraction of the price of the Dobro. You can buy four 1TB drives for around $400 and the 4TB Dobro is over $1,000. I would buy another 1TB drive and copy your existing and then wait for Snow Leopard to come out later this year.

My solution was to do what you suggest at the end or your post, Iwalker198: attach a second drive to the first. I have two 2TB drives daisy-chained to my Mac Mini. I set up Time Machine to copy one to the other, but I keep the second drive turned off and only connect it periodically when I've made some additions to my iTunes Library. This has been about as painless as can be.

Drubin

That makes the most sense. Is Time Machine easy to use? What hard drives are you using?

Time Machine is very easy. I'm using Western Digital 2TB My Book Studio Edition II drives and no problems so far. They are in my audio rack and I rarely if ever hear them operating.