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I've been ripping like a fool and have more than 500 movies/TV shows ripped, taking about 700GB on my 2TB drive. As I add about 50 movies a day, I'm planning to back up every day or so to another external 2TB drive. The first time I used CCC, but it stopped with an error - forget what it was, so I used SuperDuper. The BU went fine, copying about 500GB of files from a 1TB drive I was using for temporary storage until I got my 2TB drives. Then I backed up the 2TB working drive to a new 2TB backup drive a couple days ago.
The 2TB is the "working" drive for iTunes. Since the drive is shared, I can access it from any of the three computers I'm using to rip, but I ran into the dreaded "The disk may be full or locked" message when trying to access from one of the other computers. I checked the permissions and on the iTunes folder gave R&W to myself , Staff and Everyone and applied to all enclosed items. That appears to have solved the access problem, but now I'm doing an incremental back up from the working drive and SD is apparently copying every file. So far it's evaluated 202.77GB, 0.0 MB already up to date and 202.77GB copied. TIA.
The question is: did changing the permissions make SD think the files were all modified or is there some other thing that will make it want to overwrite every file when I do an incremental backup? Do the dates change when the file is accessed by the ATV, or when iTunes is synched to the ATV (as in when I run iTunes on a different computer and have to disconnect and then add a "new" library)? This could be a major PITA if every time I want to add a movie, once things are all copied and stable, it wants to overwrite 2 TB of files when I back up. If the issue is caused by my opening iTunes on a different computer, I can restrict myself to using the same computer all the time, once I'm done ripping.
I'd like to hear what your experiences are with backup. Maybe Raid 5 would be a good thing after all.
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Can't answer, mostly because I don't understand what the heck you're describing. Here's what I do, which may not work for your needs.
I have the iTunes Library on an external that's connected to a Mac hooked up to the TV. SuperDuper! runs the backup every so often to another external also connected to the same Mac. That's the extent of my backup: one clone, done every so often. I don't mount the backup drive unless doing a backup.
When I want to use whatever other Mac I might want for ripping, I rip and put the movie into that other Mac's iTunes first and edit metadata there. I have Home Sharing on both Macs' iTunes enabled, and go to the TV's Mac and simply import the movie into iTunes that way. Gigabit Ethernet makes it stupid-fast, but most of the time I'm too lazy for that and just do it over 802.11g WiFi, which only takes a few minutes.
An alternative to that is to use file sharing and dump the file into the TV Mac's "Add to iTunes" folder, but it means you'd have to do the metadata editing on the TV Mac (Screen Sharing helps a bunch; again, I'm too lazy to interface directly with my TV Mac.)
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Wow, I just started this process, too. I've got about 250 movies and 120 TV shows. They're stored on a large external FW drive, dedicated to housing iTunes media. And keeping them securely backed up to a separate destination just became a problem: My redundant backup drive got full, no room left. Only other large backup space I have available is a 1.5 TB Seagate Drive that's an Air Disk, on my Airport Extreme Base Station. It's got 1.3 TB available. I use it for TM backups. But because it's not directly attached, it's a network drive, my usual automated backup methods run into permission errors.
So my most recent experiment is this: I went into Time Machine prefs, and instead of excluding this FW drive from backups, I included it. I'm going to try letting Time Machine back it up. All baziillion GBs of it. (okay, about 600 GBs) Insane? You bet!
I'm letting it grind away, it'll probably take 2 or 3 days to complete the initial transfer.
I expected it would cripple my network, all that bandwidth being taken up, but it seems to be okay, I don't notice any slowdowns for other local transfers.
So I'll just let it keep going, and see if this solution offers any benefits or disadvantages.
I would ideally like it to be an invisible, automated thing, since I update my movie library regularly, I'd prefer to just know that new additions are backed up, and changes are reflected as I edit my library.
I'd be curious what other users are doing, too, first-hand reports from other members.
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My iTunes library is on an external FireWire drive. I have a second identical external drive that is dedicated for use as a backup to the first drive. I use CCC to do the incremental backup.
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I use an a drobo to hold my itunes library. No backup so I'm out of luck if it burns or gets stolen. Not easy to backup over 3tb of data.
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lazydays, not only not easy to back up 3 TB of data (data, meaning "media", music, movies, etc.) it's not easy to have the tens of thousands of hours required to CONSUME any of it. Are you starting your own Library of Congress? Do you pay assistants to listen to music you don't get time to listen to? Are you trying to bring down the grid in your zip code?
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Well, OK. To make it more clear
1. my iTunes library is on a 2TB external disk. (Let's ignore the multiple computers I'm using to rip the collection).
2. I'm doing an Smart Update using SuperDuper right now to my other 2TB external and while I imported only 100 GB since the initial backup (also done with SD on the then clean 2TB drive) SD is copying every single file over again.
3. I wonder why?
Article Accelerator: I assume you have not seen that happening (copying over every file on an incremental backup) using CCC?
I'm going to experiment - I won't access the iTunes library from any other computer - I'll import a few more movies and run SD again using Smart Update (well, when it finally finishes - been running since this morning and it's now showing "477.25GB evaluated 0.00MB already up to date, 477.25GB copied."
If it starts copying everything again, I'm going to have a fit!
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olnacl wrote:
Article Accelerator: I assume you have not seen that happening (copying over every file on an incremental backup) using CCC?
No, it appears to do true incremental backups. However, some backup applications consider a file to been changed when it has merely been 'touched,' e.g. accessed or opened. CCC seems to be reasonable about that. ChronoSync gives you a lot more control over what you want it to consider "modified" to mean. I'm not sure if SuperDuper gives you the same control.
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You ripping fool, you!
I wanted to add, that the reason I'm on a mission to back up my media library is because A. I've always stored it on a separate drive than my boot disk, and as a less critical volume, it's unfortunately been ignored when prioritizing backup regimes B. Murphy's law: whichever drive or volume you don't back up, that's the first drive to die a premature death, leaving you screwed.
I got caught unprotected. I've had my media library wiped out more than once.
This time, building it up over the last year or so, I've been more interested in keeping it backed up. Also, storage space is cheap and abundant.
Which only leads to more and more collecting and archiving, requiring more room, more storage space.
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Update: I added 20 new rips to the itunes library, did NOT run iTunes from other than the computer to which the external drive is attached, and the incremental backup went as expected, copying only the files added. I repeated the process, adding files from yet another networked computer that I'm using to rip and, again, the backup copied only the added files.
Then I went into iTunes and added comments to a few movies that were already on the backup; ran SD and it copied those files where I added comments. So that may explain some things as I had added information to a great number of the files that were already backed up before doing the incremental backup that prompted the OP. I don't think I changed EVERY file though, so I'm still wondering why the incremental backup in question copied every single file, but at least I'm comfortable with things I've discovered so far. The kicker will come when I try accessing iTunes from one of the other computers - and we know I will have to try it to satisfy my curiosity. I sure don't want to copy the entire 735GB all over again, but I really gotta know.
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