With baby on the way I am in need of some space, and my vinyl and cd collections take up a lot of room.

So I am in the process of loading all my cds onto the laptop and converting the vinyl using a USB deck so that both cds and vinyl can go into storage and/or sell some of them.

Didnt want to do this before I had some reliable form of back up for not only music but also photos & documents

A monster external hard drive is one option, but if my house burns down this will likely be destroyed too.

So what options do I have for online back up? I have used drop box before, but seeing as we have a Mac powerbook, iphones, ipads, apple TV etc is apples “icloud” the best option?

Does icloud only work for purchased music and not that which has been loaded on from cds? also notice that it only goes up to 55GB. I think my music collection is at least 70GB, plus photos, plus documents etc.

So is there a better option? Dropbox pro has 100, 200 or 500GB options at $100/$200/$500/annum??

Anythign else?

I believe that Google Music allows you to upload your own tracks – not sure if that helps you though.

iTunes Match is an option, since it doesn’t matter whether the music was bought from iTunes, ripped from CD/vinyl or…erm…”acquired”, but this of course is only for your music. If you just want online backup of all your files, try LiveDrive. It costs a few quid per year but it is unlimited. I back up music, photos, videos etc and it all happens in the background.

I love Apple stuff but I’m still unconvinced by iCloud as a backup. It wasn’t that long ago they pulled the plug on MobileMe but also, since I’m quite heavily in the Apple ecosystem, it doesn’t make sense to have all the proverbial eggs in one basket.

There is another interesting peer-to-peer backup option, whereby you and a mate backup to each other. At least you know where your data is and can get it back very easily if the worst happens. Sadly I can’t remember the name of it.

I’ve got a few options really. You need to decide if you want data synchronisation between multiple machines from the service, or purely backup.

If you want data sync, then in my opinion Dropbox is the only option.

If you aren’t bothered about syncing data to multiple machines, and purely want backup I’d be inclined to checkout services like Crashplan, or even use Arq to backup to Amazon S3 storage.

For backing up you might want to consider both offsite backup and a big external drive (a NAS would probably make the most sense). The problem with offsite backup is it can take a long time to upload everything initially, and should you have a hard drive fail you’re going to have to wait a long time for everything to download again. Something like a Netgear ReadyNAS would probably be ideal for onsite.

A monster external hard drive is one option, but if my house burns down this will likely be destroyed too.

Much the same as your Vinyl and CD’s would then 😉

Pay for a dropbox account. Uploading 70gb of music will take a while (think weeks) but if you leave the computer on overnight then it’ll just chug away at it. Make sure you have an unlimited internet package though, we’ve been stung a few times at work when we’ve had to upload masses of data to Amazon S3 and have gone over our limit.

As danielgroves said, it’s worth backing things up locally too.

iTunes Match is another possibility, but is limited to 25000 tracks.

External hard drive (with redundancy if you can afford it) at your place for time machine backups.

External hard drive at a mates’ or family’s house where you have a more occasional backup.

Vital stuff online using a combination of iCloud and Dropbox.

I use google music to store up to 20k tracks. This music can be accessed by phone or computer and played. I think it is stored at 320kbps.

I use box.com to store documents (I got 50gb free because I had an xperia phone). It syncs with my laptop document folder.

Finally Smugmug is where my photos go. It has unlimited storage space and will take 20 minute HD videos. The display format is good and it can be customised. Flickr now offers a free 1TB. However it won’t store very long videos and you have to endure adverts.

I use:
Dropbox for documents (work and personal).
Flickr for photos.
I just stream Music from Spotify, so don’t care about music files any more.

I just stream Music from Spotify, so don’t care about music files any more.

Until you lose your Internet connection. Or you go on holiday, and find the accommodation has no broadband or wifi, as was my situation last year when staying with friends in South Devon.
Fortunately, I did, amazingly, get 6Music on my little DAB portable, and I had my entire, (so far), 155Gb music collection with me on my iPod Classic.
Spotify, and other streaming music systems, are no answer at all, until there is free, hi-speed data available all over the UK, and no global roaming charges.
Would anyone like to hazard a guess as to what improbable event would precede that happening?

Spotify, and other streaming music systems, are no answer at all

If I’m going anywhere I know I can’t get on Wi-Fi I just make the playlists I want to listen to available offline. Granted that can only be done if you pay for the Premium service, but I can confidently say I spend less money on music now – but have access to more music – than I did when I bought rather than subscribed. As someone who was a fan of buying/owning music – and much of that on vinyl – I’ve surprised myself at how much I’ve embraced Spotify. Love it 😀

Carbonite.com purely for back up – $59.99 for unlimited storage.

I would suggest an external hard drive or NAS device as well as Carbonite to be sure (the old saying is if you’re data is not stored in at least 3 places it does not exist).

If you need to regularly access the files then Drop Box, Box, Skydrive etc are the places to look.

Do not, under any circumstances, rely purely on a ‘cloud’ solution for any important files. Have them local also.

Cheers

Danny B