Best Way to Back up Music Library

[DavidHB]

(04-06-2015 06:55)gnomus Wrote:  I will update for those who may be thinking of using SyncToy and who may, like me, not be all that savvy with these things.

Thank you for posting your results. I'm glad that SyncToy seems to be working for you.

SyncToy is not that technical a program to use; certainly it should not be much of a challenge for anyone who can work MinimServer . The one decision which can be difficult for a new user is which 'action' to use - synchronise, echo, or contribute. For the reasons you have now demonstrated rather well, I think that the easiest thing for a new user is to have only one master/source folder, make sure the contents of that folder are what is required, and then echo (= mirror) that folder to the backup or slave locations.

(04-06-2015 06:55)gnomus Wrote:  It was quite interesting running the program ... As far as I could tell, all of the files that needed to be overwritten were ones I had had to make tagging corrections to.

It sounds as though things have worked exactly as they should. Your account took me back. I got into digital photography well over a decade before I became interested in streaming music, so I originally used SyncToy for my photo collection. My experience then was similar to yours; folders I had thought were well organised had all kinds of files I did not know were there. I decided to back up the whole of my messy library as it was, and cleaned it up to become the master.

The cleaning process was effective; in the event, I never needed the backup, and I am still using the same master library, though (thanks to SyncToy) it has been moved from computer to computer several times during the intervening period. When I decided to build a digital music library, I used the same system, and it works just as well with the music as it does with the images.

(04-06-2015 06:55)gnomus Wrote:  I like the fact that you can use SyncToy to "Preview" changes that would be made if you were to run the utility. I did this to compare the libraries on my Synology and my QNAP. Here, I found a lot of strange things ... I don't know how to account for these - and I have many of them (thousands). ... I also don't know if I should work my way through my QNAP library deleting all of these @ea directories and their contents. Some of them are several megabytes in size. Does anyone have any thoughts?

I don't know where these files came from (often, you never do know); because generating thousands of files without the user's knowledge requires a lot of background access, my guess would be is that the culprit is whatever media server comes pre-installed on the QNAP. If you don't use this server for music, the files are presumably surplus to requirements. If you happen to have the space (say an odd hard drive you are not using), you could do what I did with your photos, and create an offline backup of the QNAP music folder, just in case there is an issue. Any files on the QNAP that you want to keep should be copied to the master library (on the 213J, I think) if they are not already there. Then you could use SyncToy to echo the master library to the music folder on the QNAP. That process will remove all the spurious files as well as any other inconsistencies, and the backup is there if they turn out not to be spurious after all. If you can't stop the QNAP application, it would presumably go on generating files, but at least these would be deleted every time you used SyncToy.

Thank you also for mentioning the SyncToy preview, which I should have referred to as it is a very good safety feature.

Going forward, the name of the game is to maintain consistency between all the copies of your library, which is what having a single master folder (where you do all your ripping and metadata changes) and the echo action of SyncToy are all about. As a mentor said to me many years ago, "If you cannot be consistently right, you should at least be consistently wrong".

David