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Decent one digital life » tip re: using iTunes to back up your music via playlists.

Although probably possible to use this approach for a 280GB library, impractical. Although the experience would likely remind me of the heady days of backing up my Mac SE’s 80GB external Ehman hard drive with DiskFit (which may have become Dantz, which in turn was acquired by EMC) and a stack of 1.4MB floppies.

However, it is a valid approach (in my case) for doing periodic DVD backups of my Purchased Music (12GB, ~3 DVDs).

So, how do I back up my iTunes?

UNIX rsync. My “Audio Core” directory is cron’ed to do an rsync to an external hard drive every hour.

This is relevant because last week (Saturday, actually) I came home to discover one of the two Maxtors in my 2-disk RAID 0 set had left for the Great Gig in the Sky. I can’t blame it - it was about 3 years old, had probably been turned off less than 48 hours during that time, and… it was just time.

Within moments of identifying the failure as drive-related, I had re-set my iTunes preferences to use the rsync copy, told iTunes to not re-organize everything, and my most mission-critical dataset (since I can’t work / write without music) was back online and servicing users (me).

Sometimes, it is possible to win a little battle.

This tip is especially relevant because Apple Backup 3.x’s “smart” list to back up protected music does nothing, as far as I can tell, other than create a false sense of security for its users. I tried it once. It backed up approximately 800MB (out of the aforementioned 12GB of legitimate data).

I use Backup for one purpose - to protect my “Writing” Finder folder with a weekly backup. Also, I have a cron job that rsync’s said folder… to two different external hard disks… hourly.

As you can tell, I have tremendous faith in Backup. Apple is a company that has a very wide and deep understanding of storage and data protection…

rds