Having a good back-up of everything is a pretty important part of the project. I finally picked up a 1 TB hard drive today and started to back up the library, but discovered a couple of problems that I had to solve first.

A few days ago, I started to also put mp3 downloads from eMusic onto the main computer (which is how I have been buying my music for the past year and a half). I had two drives hooked up (a 80 GB and a 250GB drive) and I decided to put the mp3s onto the smaller drive since I wasn’t sure when I would be getting the larger drive that the project will be needing. So when I got the new drive today, I realized that I should just put the whole library in one place (the 250 GB drive). Of course – I then realized that moving all the mp3s would mess up the links in the iTunes library! Luckily iTunes has a way to deal with this.

There is a function called ‘Consolidate Library’ that will copy all your files to a central location. Worked like a charm, and I had the new drive plugged in pretty quick. Then I had to decide how to deal with the backups themselves. TimeMachine (in OS X 10.5 and later) is good for making an archived clone of your system, but I am really only concerned about backing up the soundfiles. So I checkout out Carbon Copy Cloner first.

The clone went quick. Too quick. When I looked at the back-up, there was a problem with permissions and most of the data was not backed up. A couple Google searches didn’t really reveal anything so I thought about using rsync (which I use for a couple of coding projects I maintain). The nice thing about rsync is that only changed files are backed up, so backups should go faster. I decided to use a GUI program called arSync (with a pirate icon) to run things and it is working well so far. But the initial backup is over 40 GBs, and rsync needs to also keep a log of what is backed up (as well as checksums and the last time a file is opened / altered).

The initial backup is taking a loooooong time. But after the first, things should go faster. But until it is done, I’m probably not going to rip any discs…