Dave nailed it.
Toon Town Dave wrote:Nathan, I think you're missing Stan's point. Backups are about protecting digital assets, in our case, our music collection and the effort required to collect and digitize it for DJ purposes. In general, the backup is something you should have but should hopefully never need to use.
Exactly. It's not that I couldn't re-rip my entire music collection into the computer. BUT...that would take months of time just to re-rip, and more months to organize and tag all the songs according to dance, etc, etc, etc. My backup is guarding against that effort.
Would it be worth $100 to avoid having to re-rip your whole music collection again? It's worth many times that amount for me.
Toon Town Dave wrote:It's not about the device. If a laptop (or iPod or CD player) dies, you can go to the local computer/electronics store and buy a new one off the shelf at any time. If the hard drive (or iPod or laptop) goes up in smoke, gets stolen, goes swimming, or whatever, your music is gone.
Having a second laptop is something I recommend if you are planning to make your living as a DJ. There is no worse feeling that showing up to an event, and finding out that your computer won't boot up, and that this will be a "CD based" event. But, that's the same reason you have 2 amps, and a backup mic, and more than one mixer, etc, etc.
BUT, if this is a hobby - then hold off on the second computer. One night using your "emergency CD's" won't kill you. In the mean time, that new laptop will cost 1/2 of the one that needs replacing, or the new one will be twice as capable.
Toon Town Dave wrote:The duplicate hard drive is a great, cost effective means of backup on a budget. I don't think it's the best but it's better than nothing and simple.
Out of curiosity, what do you think is best?
Toon Town Dave wrote:DVD's are also good for smaller sets of data, especially if there is lots of data that seldom changes. I use DVD-RW's for much of my stuff. The down side is they require a lot of human intervention to create.
I used DVD's as a backup until I had about 20GB of music. After that, the hard drive approach was easier for me to manage.
--Stan Graves