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About a year ago NetApp bought Riverbed's old SteelStore (nee Whitewater) product -- it's an enterprise-grade front-end to using Glacier (and other nearline sto

by Jedd 11y ago

About a year ago NetApp bought Riverbed's old SteelStore (nee Whitewater) product -- it's an enterprise-grade front-end to using Glacier (and other nearline storage systems). It provide a nice cached index via a web GUI that let you queue up restores in a fairly painless way. It even had smarts in there to let you throttle your restores to stay under the magical 5% free retrieval quota. It's not a cheap product, and obviously overkill for a one-off throw of 60GB of non-critical data ... but point being there are some good interfaces to Glacier, and roll-your-own shell scripts probably aren't. As noted by others here, if you treat glacier as a restore-of-absolute-last-resort, you'll have a happier time of it. Perhaps I'm being churlish, but I railed at a few things in this article: If you're concerned about music quality / longevity / (future) portability - why convert your audio collection AAC? Assuming ~650MB per CD, and the 150 CD's quoted, and ~50% reduction using FLAC, I get just shy of 50GB total storage requirements -- compared to the 63GB 'apple lossless' quoted. (Again, why the appeal of proprietary formats for long term storage and future re-encoding?) I know 2012 was an awfully long time ago, but were external mag disks really that onerous back then, in terms of price and management of redundant copies? How was the OP's other critical data being stored (presumably not on glacier). F.e. my photo collection has been larger than 60GB since way before 2012. Why not just keep the box of CD's in the garage / under the bed / in the attic? SPOF, understood. But world+dog is ditching their physical CD's, so replacements are now easy and inexpensive to re-acquire. If you can't tell the difference between high-quality audio and originals now - why would you think your hearing is going to improve over the next decade such that you can discern a difference? And if you're going to buy a service, why forego exploring and understanding the costs of using same?

stordoff 11y ago
> Assuming ~650MB per CD, and the 150 CD's quoted, and ~50% reduction using FLAC, I get just shy of 50GB total storage requirements -- compared to the 63GB 'apple lossless' quoted. (Again, why the appeal of proprietary formats for long term storage and future re-encoding?) I did a comparison between FLAC and ALAC (a.k.a. Apple Lossless) on my CD library a few years ago (plus a few 48kHz tracks taken from DVDs), and the difference in total filesize was less than 10% so I doubt that is a major factor. I personally went for ALAC, as it has equal (EAC, VLC) or better support (OS X Finder, iTunes, Windows Explorer, Windows 10 media player, some tagging scripts, iOS) in stuff I currently use. Providing I keep a decoder with the files, its proprietary nature doesn't really bother me - I can always convert to xLAC if desired.
- Jedd 11y ago
  Interesting, thanks. I wouldn't use a proprietary format because I could neverbe sure when in the future I'd want to read / re-encode, and what type of systems I'd have available at that timer, other than knowing I'd always have access to free software. I have some FLAC archives, but I don't use them - so support to play that format hasn't been something I've taken much notice of. Do you normally play your ALACs, or keep an mp3 / ogg / aac version around to actually listen to?
  - tjl 11y ago
    It's not exactly proprietary since Apple open sourced the ALAC code in 2011. https://alac.macosforge.org https://alac.macosforge.org Also, someone has wrapped it to build with different tool chains. https://github.com/TimothyGu/alac https://github.com/TimothyGu/alac
  - stordoff 11y ago
    I normally play the ALACs directly (most of my listening is done on my PC, streaming from my NAS). I used to keep an AAC version around for my mobile devices, but never really used it so don't bother any more.
- lmm 11y ago
  Interesting. My sense was that FLAC was much more widely supported - in terms of my specific cases the Amazon player supports FLAC but I don't think it supports ALAC, and I'd worry about being able to play them on my Android phone.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Apple open-sourced ALAC and made it royalty-free in 2011, it's no longer a proprietary format.

by Jedd 11y ago

stordoff 11y ago

> Assuming ~650MB per CD, and the 150 CD's quoted, and ~50% reduction using FLAC, I get just shy of 50GB total storage requirements -- compared to the 63GB 'apple lossless' quoted. (Again, why the appeal of proprietary formats for long term storage and future re-encoding?) I did a comparison between FLAC and ALAC (a.k.a. Apple Lossless) on my CD library a few years ago (plus a few 48kHz tracks taken from DVDs), and the difference in total filesize was less than 10% so I doubt that is a major factor. I personally went for ALAC, as it has equal (EAC, VLC) or better support (OS X Finder, iTunes, Windows Explorer, Windows 10 media player, some tagging scripts, iOS) in stuff I currently use. Providing I keep a decoder with the files, its proprietary nature doesn't really bother me - I can always convert to xLAC if desired.

Jedd 11y ago
Interesting, thanks. I wouldn't use a proprietary format because I could neverbe sure when in the future I'd want to read / re-encode, and what type of systems I'd have available at that timer, other than knowing I'd always have access to free software. I have some FLAC archives, but I don't use them - so support to play that format hasn't been something I've taken much notice of. Do you normally play your ALACs, or keep an mp3 / ogg / aac version around to actually listen to?
- tjl 11y ago
  It's not exactly proprietary since Apple open sourced the ALAC code in 2011. https://alac.macosforge.org https://alac.macosforge.org Also, someone has wrapped it to build with different tool chains. https://github.com/TimothyGu/alac https://github.com/TimothyGu/alac
- stordoff 11y ago
  I normally play the ALACs directly (most of my listening is done on my PC, streaming from my NAS). I used to keep an AAC version around for my mobile devices, but never really used it so don't bother any more.
lmm 11y ago
Interesting. My sense was that FLAC was much more widely supported - in terms of my specific cases the Amazon player supports FLAC but I don't think it supports ALAC, and I'd worry about being able to play them on my Android phone.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

Apple open-sourced ALAC and made it royalty-free in 2011, it's no longer a proprietary format.