6 ms·

Not that it excuses any of this on Apple's part, but holy shit do people with like a ton of music not realize backups are important? Like seriously buy a NAS of

Not that it excuses any of this on Apple's part, but holy shit do people with like a ton of music not realize backups are important? Like seriously buy a NAS of any caliber from anywhere or an external HDD or use dropbox but don't put all your eggs in one basket people. I get that "shit happens" and all, but I don't understand how backups are not more prominently known in tech culture as mandatory for data you care about.

pcurve 4y ago
I agree... most people's music collection should fit fine on a 256GB thumbdrive, which costs less than $25 nowadays.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  Don't rely on flash memory too much for long-term backup, flash technology is not particularly good at retaining bits without refreshing.
- naravara 4y ago
  The initial back-up isn't the problem. It's keeping it current over time as you add new music. Then you need to keep track of which songs are on which drive and also access your backups often enough that some of the routine error checking happens to mitigate bit rot. Especially a problem with flash storage since it really isn't designed for long-term storage without being plugged in.
rolph 4y ago
this problem is result of training the market to meet the supply
verytrivial 4y ago
The media is dirt cheap, but doing the backup is fraught. I think only Time Machine actually "solved" that usability problem and frankly kept me on Apple products longer than I would otherwise have endured. I still don't know the right way to backup a Windows 10 machine that doesn't involve hours of research, testing, tradeoffs and probably $$$.
- endigma 4y ago
  borg, restic, synology, windows also has built in functionality too.
  - verytrivial 4y ago
    Yeah, this is really what I'm talking about. The comment was about why everyone doesn't do backup. I contend it's because most people aren't using Macs, because if they were, there is one obvious, almost foolproof option that covers 95% of end-user requirements, and that you don't need to think about. I mean the system restore process is embarrassingly good (or was when I left the ecosystem): replace dead HDD, boot off installation media, attach the TM drive and say "yes please" when it asks you if you want to restore everything. The options you list are aimed at the "power user" and burdens them accordingly.
ryandrake 4y ago
The “Bitcoin” people have that saying, cautioning people about wallet ownership and the danger of cloud wallets: “Not your keys, not your coins.” I think we need a clever saying to rattle off every time someone gets burned by relying 100% on a cloud service (either the software screws up user data or suspends their account, without recourse) without backups/alternates. Not your drive, not your data? I don’t know, I’m not creative.
- theandrewbailey 4y ago
  "If you can't hold copies of it, it's not your data." As in: two external drives, unplugged, one in each hand, each with a complete, usable copy. Bonus points for storing them in separate buildings miles away from each other.
- endigma 4y ago
  Reminiscent of "the cloud is just someone else's computer", perhaps it can be extended to this situation with a few more words.
- mpol 4y ago
  "If you don't have a backup, it wasn't important." It is somewhat too tough, and I haven't yet said it to anyone in his/her face. In my mind I think it often.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  Not your metal, not your music. Not your bits, not your beats.
- endigma 4y ago
  Imagine one of those short films from grade school with drunk driving or drug abuse or whatever, but with a severe data loss incident. Show it off to kids nationwide, they'd take the sentiment home to their parents. Imagine being a 40something and having your kid come home and say "Are our family photos backed up locally, redundantly on a rotating schedule with a tested disaster recovery plan?" "An untested disaster recovery plan isn't a disaster recovery plan".
blowski 4y ago
My friend is in his 60s who is not very technical, but is very into music. He has 1000s of (purchased) CDs and vinyl. He has ripped a lot of it onto a local hard drive. I can see how he might think Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files. It seems a failing of modern technology that he needs to understand backup in the sense of bits on a magnetic disk is different to being able to access the files as a network stream. I imagine many tech companies are quite happy to let the confusion continue.
- lancesells 4y ago
  Isn't his backup his CDs and vinyl? I get the reason for maintaining another backup but your friend seems to be reasonably fine using Apple Music.
  - blowski 4y ago
    He's put _a lot_ of effort into ripping them.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    No, because they degrade.
- FabHK 4y ago
  Would he be able to, or want to, distinguish his particular rip of an album from Apple's rip of an album? If he doesn't, then for all practical purpose Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files, IIUC. The ones that Apple recognizes will be "replaced" by Apple's rip (on synced devices and/or, if he ever deletes the original file, on the original device), often in higher quality, btw, and the ones that Apple does not recognize will be a bit-for-bit copy.
  - blowski 4y ago
    The naive mental model of how this works is that Apple is taking the files he ripped onto his hard drive, storing them in the cloud, and then streaming them over the internet to his other devices. As you say, this is effectively what happens most of the time. The quality and consistency is so high that nobody's going to notice a few flipped bits. But for a niche album - a semi-official bootleg of an obscure 70s prog rock band - it goes wrong more frequently. It can't find the original album, but finds one the algorithm it thinks is close enough, but is actually a studio recording of a tribute band.
knaik94 4y ago
I think it's understandable that someone wouldn't expect to need a backup of their music library. At a bare minimum, I would expect iTunes to keep both versions of a file if an identical one can't be retrieved from Apple servers. People that care enough to keep a library of music after the popularity of Spotify are the same people to leave the ecosystem permanently when this kind of stuff happens.
- endigma 4y ago
  iTunes should do this, but ultimately it and a shitload of other things can change your files in a negative way and give the user no recourse. Versioned, deduplicating, infinite history backups are the solution, the friction to get started is far less than the friction to repair your files after a loss incident.
reaperducer 4y ago
holy shit do people with like a ton of music not realize backups are important? A backup doesn't help when a service is silently changing your files. Once you realize a file isn't right, you look into it and discover that it was automatically replaced by the service three or four years ago. It is not reasonable to expect anyone - even a tech-literate person - to keep 300 hard drives around for a decade or more, and audit every change made on them hour by hour.
- endigma 4y ago
  Deduplicating backup software has existed for ages, they would only have a backup of each distinct file, so when A.mp3 is "silently changed" the backup software now has "A.mp3 (before)" and "A.mp3 (after)" etc. Look into borg, restic etc if interested. If you saw in your backup software that a shitload of files changed you would both be alerted of the "silent change" as well as able to revert it.
  - Steuard 4y ago
    Okay, but you're now moving away from "How could people not know to make backups???" to "This problem could in principle be avoided by people who use specific types of backup software and maintain complete snapshots going back at least five years". Still a good idea, certainly, but it feels like we've moved well out of "holy shit" territory. (Also, isn't Apple's own built-in Time Machine exactly the sort of backup that you're talking about here?) As for carefully monitoring your backup software to keep track of when files change, 1) I think we're getting even farther into the "not reasonable to expect of ordinary users" range here, and 2) if I did somehow happen to notice that a bunch of music files had changed, I'd be a lot more likely to assume that Apple Music had updated their ID3 tags than that it had completely rewritten the music!
    - endigma 4y ago
      I agree with you on the ease of use front. Someone should make a company to do all this shit in the background but not get rid of the "your computer" part. Offer a NAS or a Pi derivative and some companion software that wraps restic/Borg/whatever and handles all the hard parts for you.

pcurve 4y ago

I agree... most people's music collection should fit fine on a 256GB thumbdrive, which costs less than $25 nowadays.

rhn_mk1 4y ago
Don't rely on flash memory too much for long-term backup, flash technology is not particularly good at retaining bits without refreshing.
naravara 4y ago
The initial back-up isn't the problem. It's keeping it current over time as you add new music. Then you need to keep track of which songs are on which drive and also access your backups often enough that some of the routine error checking happens to mitigate bit rot. Especially a problem with flash storage since it really isn't designed for long-term storage without being plugged in.

rolph 4y ago

this problem is result of training the market to meet the supply

verytrivial 4y ago

The media is dirt cheap, but doing the backup is fraught. I think only Time Machine actually "solved" that usability problem and frankly kept me on Apple products longer than I would otherwise have endured. I still don't know the right way to backup a Windows 10 machine that doesn't involve hours of research, testing, tradeoffs and probably $$$.

endigma 4y ago
borg, restic, synology, windows also has built in functionality too.
- verytrivial 4y ago
  Yeah, this is really what I'm talking about. The comment was about why everyone doesn't do backup. I contend it's because most people aren't using Macs, because if they were, there is one obvious, almost foolproof option that covers 95% of end-user requirements, and that you don't need to think about. I mean the system restore process is embarrassingly good (or was when I left the ecosystem): replace dead HDD, boot off installation media, attach the TM drive and say "yes please" when it asks you if you want to restore everything. The options you list are aimed at the "power user" and burdens them accordingly.

ryandrake 4y ago

The “Bitcoin” people have that saying, cautioning people about wallet ownership and the danger of cloud wallets: “Not your keys, not your coins.” I think we need a clever saying to rattle off every time someone gets burned by relying 100% on a cloud service (either the software screws up user data or suspends their account, without recourse) without backups/alternates. Not your drive, not your data? I don’t know, I’m not creative.

theandrewbailey 4y ago
"If you can't hold copies of it, it's not your data." As in: two external drives, unplugged, one in each hand, each with a complete, usable copy. Bonus points for storing them in separate buildings miles away from each other.
endigma 4y ago
Reminiscent of "the cloud is just someone else's computer", perhaps it can be extended to this situation with a few more words.
mpol 4y ago
"If you don't have a backup, it wasn't important." It is somewhat too tough, and I haven't yet said it to anyone in his/her face. In my mind I think it often.
jvanderbot 4y ago
Not your metal, not your music. Not your bits, not your beats.
endigma 4y ago
Imagine one of those short films from grade school with drunk driving or drug abuse or whatever, but with a severe data loss incident. Show it off to kids nationwide, they'd take the sentiment home to their parents. Imagine being a 40something and having your kid come home and say "Are our family photos backed up locally, redundantly on a rotating schedule with a tested disaster recovery plan?" "An untested disaster recovery plan isn't a disaster recovery plan".

blowski 4y ago

My friend is in his 60s who is not very technical, but is very into music. He has 1000s of (purchased) CDs and vinyl. He has ripped a lot of it onto a local hard drive. I can see how he might think Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files. It seems a failing of modern technology that he needs to understand backup in the sense of bits on a magnetic disk is different to being able to access the files as a network stream. I imagine many tech companies are quite happy to let the confusion continue.

lancesells 4y ago
Isn't his backup his CDs and vinyl? I get the reason for maintaining another backup but your friend seems to be reasonably fine using Apple Music.
- blowski 4y ago
  He's put _a lot_ of effort into ripping them.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  No, because they degrade.
FabHK 4y ago
Would he be able to, or want to, distinguish his particular rip of an album from Apple's rip of an album? If he doesn't, then for all practical purpose Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files, IIUC. The ones that Apple recognizes will be "replaced" by Apple's rip (on synced devices and/or, if he ever deletes the original file, on the original device), often in higher quality, btw, and the ones that Apple does not recognize will be a bit-for-bit copy.
- blowski 4y ago
  The naive mental model of how this works is that Apple is taking the files he ripped onto his hard drive, storing them in the cloud, and then streaming them over the internet to his other devices. As you say, this is effectively what happens most of the time. The quality and consistency is so high that nobody's going to notice a few flipped bits. But for a niche album - a semi-official bootleg of an obscure 70s prog rock band - it goes wrong more frequently. It can't find the original album, but finds one the algorithm it thinks is close enough, but is actually a studio recording of a tribute band.

knaik94 4y ago

I think it's understandable that someone wouldn't expect to need a backup of their music library. At a bare minimum, I would expect iTunes to keep both versions of a file if an identical one can't be retrieved from Apple servers. People that care enough to keep a library of music after the popularity of Spotify are the same people to leave the ecosystem permanently when this kind of stuff happens.

endigma 4y ago
iTunes should do this, but ultimately it and a shitload of other things can change your files in a negative way and give the user no recourse. Versioned, deduplicating, infinite history backups are the solution, the friction to get started is far less than the friction to repair your files after a loss incident.

reaperducer 4y ago

holy shit do people with like a ton of music not realize backups are important? A backup doesn't help when a service is silently changing your files. Once you realize a file isn't right, you look into it and discover that it was automatically replaced by the service three or four years ago. It is not reasonable to expect anyone - even a tech-literate person - to keep 300 hard drives around for a decade or more, and audit every change made on them hour by hour.

endigma 4y ago
Deduplicating backup software has existed for ages, they would only have a backup of each distinct file, so when A.mp3 is "silently changed" the backup software now has "A.mp3 (before)" and "A.mp3 (after)" etc. Look into borg, restic etc if interested. If you saw in your backup software that a shitload of files changed you would both be alerted of the "silent change" as well as able to revert it.
- Steuard 4y ago
  Okay, but you're now moving away from "How could people not know to make backups???" to "This problem could in principle be avoided by people who use specific types of backup software and maintain complete snapshots going back at least five years". Still a good idea, certainly, but it feels like we've moved well out of "holy shit" territory. (Also, isn't Apple's own built-in Time Machine exactly the sort of backup that you're talking about here?) As for carefully monitoring your backup software to keep track of when files change, 1) I think we're getting even farther into the "not reasonable to expect of ordinary users" range here, and 2) if I did somehow happen to notice that a bunch of music files had changed, I'd be a lot more likely to assume that Apple Music had updated their ID3 tags than that it had completely rewritten the music!
  - endigma 4y ago
    I agree with you on the ease of use front. Someone should make a company to do all this shit in the background but not get rid of the "your computer" part. Offer a NAS or a Pi derivative and some companion software that wraps restic/Borg/whatever and handles all the hard parts for you.