February 2006 - Archiving your Audio/Video System & Software - page 3
Step Five: Hard Drives
 Hard drives get faster and faster, as well as cheaper and bigger every year. Little is said about reliability. From my experiences in 2005, I can tell you the downward pressure on price and increases to size have made hard drives less reliable. In terms of your music collection, you likely have ripped your collection onto an external hard drive where you also save your music that you download from sites like iTunes.com and elsewhere.
You have the right to back these files up, and I recommend you do so. With 500 gig hard drives costing less than $400 in today’s market, there is no reason why you can’t archive your collection of music so that it lives on one drive at home and another one at work. Be sure to password protect the one at work, so if that somehow gets stolen, you won’t have some jackass uploading your music to Limewire. Foolish things you should avoid with you music server include giving copies of your music to people and/or connecting to peer to peer sites where people can download your music from your drive. Your music is for you and that is what the Fair Use legislation is about. Don’t give it away or the RIAA might come after you, which is something you don’t need.
Tip: just because you have 6,000 songs on your iPod doesn’t mean they are backed up. Your iPod can go bad, considering it is basically a portable hard drive with a sexy little interface on it. iPods are more about loading songs onto them than downloading songs from them to other devices.
Tip: It is important that you keep your music on a separate drive (installed in a PC or external is fine), as opposed to on your main computer. Music files eat up your drive’s space and cost you performance on your computer. You can run a music software program like iTunes, pulling songs from one drive while you work on another drive on your main computer with seamless ease.
Conclusion
If you play your cards right, losing your software collection or home theater system isn’t the end of the world. In my case, the damage done to my little British Naim and Celestion system during the 1994 Northridge earthquake helped me get into my first separate components. From there, I was able to upgrade into damn near every brand of high-end gear ever made. My music collection getting stolen helped me make it in Los Angeles when I was a kid in school. It also introduced me to an opportunity to readdress what music was worthy of being in my collection, given a limited budget. For example: after the Black Album, I wasn’t that interested in listening to Metallica and went years without owning even the early records. Ultimately, I purchased them all back and enjoyed many (the pre-Black Album) records with renewed enthusiasm.
Unfortunately, bad things sometimes happen to good people. With 30 minutes of effort and a little forethought, you will be able to turn lemons into lemonade with your music and movie collection, as well as your home theater system.
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