Make sure you backup

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Make sure you backup

2006-01-31 10:04:17

Just thought i'd remind everyone to make sure they back up thier music. I didn't and am now having to check my entire 119GB FLAC collection because i've had something go wrong, filesytem corruption or HDD faliure (SMART is OK though), i don't know what the exact problem was/is.

As it stands some tracks stop playing (FLAC's) and others are intermixed!!!!

I have devin townsen's ocean machine, with a sample from nick cave's murder ballads apearing for 5 or so seconds in the track!!!!!!! Very odd, and suprised it's still playable at all.

This drive was only powered on when i wanted to add to the collection or convert. This time i wanted to replace my mp3's with ogg vorbis, so i deleted the mp3's, spent 12 hours converting to vorbis, only to discover the corruption afterwards.

Now i have the hassle of checking all the FLAC's, re-encoding the good ones to vorbis again, and then re-ripping all the other stuff.

My own stupid fault really just wat to remind everyone how important backups are!!

Cheers,

Kristian

Make sure you backup

Reply #1 – 2006-01-31 10:47:43

Sorry to hear that...

Hope this helps (from the flac site): "The integrity of the audio data is further insured by storing an MD5 signature of the original unencoded audio data in the file header, which can be compared against later during decoding or testing."

I don't know which tools make use of that, however, it would be a real time saver for you.

Funny that the files got mixed - flac is streamable ofcourse, but it is still surprising.

What file system are you using? Maybe there's a repair tool to help you out.

Make sure you backup

Reply #2 – 2006-01-31 12:00:14

ok, we should backup, but where?

DVDs? I dont touch again these things.

Hope the new optic discs, the "blue" ones at least have a case around the disk itself(remember caddys?)

The only solution i am aware for now are ultrium drives, but i havent decided to spentmoney on these yet. Does anyone uses 'em for his music db btw?

For data restoration in your case i dont think its possible (intemixed files) probably your FS is screwed up!
That doesnt mean that the drive itself has a problem thought but make sure its well cooled, maybe the temperature was the cause of the problem

Make sure you backup

Reply #3 – 2006-01-31 12:10:55

yeah that's a bad scenario kritip... sorry to hear that and thank for the reminder

Quote

ok, we should backup, but where? DVDs? I dont touch again these things.

...for whatever reason...
if you want to be as sure as you can get in the digital world use different media to store your data. e.g. on HD, DVD and DVD-Ram.
it's as important though to store it under right circumstances (i.e. in a dry, dark place, vertically (for CDs/DVDs)).

Make sure you backup

Reply #4 – 2006-01-31 13:14:21

Quote

Sorry to hear that...

Hope this helps (from the flac site): "The integrity of the audio data is further insured by storing an MD5 signature of the original unencoded audio data in the file header, which can be compared against later during decoding or testing."

The md5 allows for checking integrity but doesn't allow for recovery. I belive the flac -t switch decodes the audio, and compares the md5 with the stored one. I use a flac tester gui for checking them recursivly. Done about a quarter so far and only 3 bad. Not going as bad as anticipated

Quote

Funny that the files got mixed - flac is streamable ofcourse, but it is still surprising.

What file system are you using? Maybe there's a repair tool to help you out.
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=360951"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

It is very odd that the file got a bit of the other, maybe i can cut the vorbis copy and upload is anyone is interested to hear it??

They were stored on reiserfs v3 in my gentoo server, not mounted moust of the time though. I recently transferd it all to fat32 to use in windows, think thats where things could have gone dodgy.

Quote

ok, we should backup, but where?

I think another hard disk, stored in a different place is best, i don't trust DVD-r,+r enough, RAM would be ok, but write times are slow and cost are far too high!

Quote

For data restoration in your case i dont think its possible (intemixed files) probably your FS is screwed up!
That doesnt mean that the drive itself has a problem thought but make sure its well cooled, maybe the temperature was the cause of the problem
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=360964"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I have 4 drives in this PC, the one witht he lossless doesn't support temp monitring, but the other 3 are just over 30 degrees celcius, so thats ok.

Cheers for the support anyway Hopefully there won't be to many more corrupt ones

Kristian

Make sure you backup

Reply #5 – 2006-01-31 13:30:54

Quote

It is very odd that the file got a bit of the other, maybe i can cut the vorbis copy and upload is anyone is interested to hear it??

Nah, I can imagine what it sounds like. If you're on a FAT32 file system and these files got interleaved (as in fragmented), then this is perhaps the result when the FAT goes bad.

It sort of advertises the robustness of flac - parts of the nick-cave-file are still accessible without proper file system pointers to it. It also advertises FAT32 in a less positive way

Quote

Quote
ok, we should backup, but where?

I think another hard disk, stored in a different place is best, i don't trust DVD-r,+r enough, RAM would be ok, but write times are slow and cost are far too high!
[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=360980"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I'm thinking about something like those Infrant readyNAS boxes (perhaps a homebrew version), and then luring a friend into getting one too. That way you can mirror eachother's files which is a cheap way of having offsite backup... (ofcourse, if you have 120Gb in flac's you'll have to do the initial mirroring with both boxes at one site)

Make sure you backup

Reply #6 – 2006-01-31 13:48:04

It wasn't on the fat32 drive very long though, the total process was:

Code: [Select]

Resiserfs --> FAT32 --> NTFS

As linux NTFS support isn't too great for writing. The FAT 32 was specially formated for this purpose, as was the NTFS, no quick formatting either.

It was only on the FAT32 for a few hours. Regardless of how it happened anyway, it does show the robustness of flac I could decode through errors, cut the nick cave out, and then just have abit of the song missing.

Just need to get some ££ for more hard disks for backups now lol

Kristian

Make sure you backup

Reply #7 – 2006-01-31 14:30:52

KRITIP run a memtest86 check on your machine for a few hours to rule out memory problems. I had similar data corruption in Monkey's Audio files and it turned out to be bad ram causing rare data errors on the hard disk.

The bad ram wasn't affecting the machine in any other way.

Make sure you backup

Reply #8 – 2006-01-31 14:34:45

Cheers for the advice, once i discoverd i ran memtest86, prime95 and a few other utils to check my current pc integrity and all seems good. For all i know it could have been the last system it was in.

Thanks anyhow,

Kristian

Make sure you backup

Reply #9 – 2006-01-31 15:39:33

Well, out of 119GB I only have the following corrupt files:

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X:\lossless\D\devin townsend\ocean machine - biomech\01 -- seventh wave .flac...ERROR_FRAME_CRC_MISMATCH @ 1m 47s
X:\lossless\E\Earthtone9\Lo-definition discord\11 -- Sand .flac...ERROR_LOST_SYNC @ 1m 52s
X:\lossless\N\nick cave & the bad seeds\the best of nick cave & the bad seeds\12 -- henry lee .flac...ERROR_LOST_SYNC @ 3m 40s
X:\lossless\P\pink floyd\Pink Floyd - At The Beeb 1970 - 1971\Pink Floyd BBC Session 1971\05 - Echoes.flac...ERROR_FRAME_CRC_MISMATCH @ 21m 9s

Not to bad after all, sadly one is a downloaded file so i'll have to source that again.

Cheers,

Kristian

//EDIT

Sorry, noticed this got moved to off-topic. Wasn't really sure where i should have put it, hardware, general, etc. Guess this is probably the proper place though.

Make sure you backup

Reply #10 – 2006-01-31 21:30:50

Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly,
There's not half the files there used to be,
And there's a deadline hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.

I pushed
something wrong
What it was, I could not say.
Now all my data's gone
And I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.

(text ripped from some other forum.)

Make sure you backup

Reply #11 – 2006-02-01 02:54:24

BTW, on 3rd February there's some viri named Nyxem going to activate, in opposition to most other recent viruses, it doesn't open back-doors but deletes files, so it might be another reason to do a backup if you haven't yet.

Make sure you backup

Reply #12 – 2006-02-01 23:53:27

I love backing up to be honest, once you've got a stable system going you just leave it do it's thing. I highly recommend at the very least using Windows backup available on the XP CD, Task Scheduler and a batch file to burn a select amount of data to DVD-R once a week.

If you need more space, get more DVD-R drives perhaps, or an external USB solution. It's well worth it!

Ruairi

Make sure you backup

Reply #13 – 2006-02-02 01:02:46

Quote

ok, we should backup, but where?

DVDs? I dont touch again these things.

Hope the new optic discs, the "blue" ones at least have a case around the disk itself(remember caddys?)

For reliable backups that will last a long time, consider magnetic tape backup

Make sure you backup

Reply #14 – 2006-02-02 11:42:07

Quote

As it stands some tracks stop playing (FLAC's) and others are intermixed!!!!

I have devin townsen's ocean machine, with a sample from nick cave's murder ballads apearing for 5 or so seconds in the track!!!!!!! Very odd, and suprised it's still playable at all.

This happened to me. In my case the power went out while I was resizing a partion. Maybe the mft gets screwed up or something? Many of my files were corrupted while other were mixed together.

I just reripped the lot.

Make sure you backup

Reply #15 – 2006-02-02 13:11:14

Very bad. I wish I had more time to backup my data, but everytime it tooks too much time...

About DVDs, I use DVD+R for data storing and I think that in case of physical damage the data loss is very big. So I store the important data in 2 DVD+R discs.

Make sure you backup

Reply #16 – 2006-02-02 20:48:53

Sorry to threadjack, but how would you guys do the backing up on my music server?

I have a dedicated Shuttle SB65G2 XPC running Win 2k Pro, with two physical 160 GB Samsung discs. One disc includes the C: partition for the OS and programs and the D: partition for music (currently about 100 GB of FLACs and MP3s). The other disc has the E: partition for backing up the D: partition. All partitions use NTFS. I usually log in as a normal user and that's how I do my ripping and encoding. Every now and then I manually copy the fresh rips to the E: partition logged-in as admin as only the admin has write and delete rights on E:

As my collection grows I'd like to find an easier - yet reliable - way to do the backing up. My mother board doesn't support RAID 1 so that's currently out of the question. I wan't the the E: partition to be a "normal" disc - that means no compressed or virtual partitions or anything like that.

Any suggestions how to do this? Please, no suggestions about using an external back up disc as I already know that's what I should - and one day will - do.

Make sure you backup

Reply #17 – 2006-02-04 01:21:35

kritip,

Make sure you don't have a dust problem on your northbridge chip. I just blew the dust out of my ubuntu box after it chewed up its file system (ext3) twice in one week. Very annoying. There also was no grease on the heatsink. All better now.

Make sure you backup

Reply #18 – 2006-02-06 20:27:40

I have a 75gb collection of mp3s. I've only backed up two DVD's worth so far. I only want to back them up when i have them all tagged properly, so it takes time. I'm not to worried about my HD crashing, but I know it could happen. So is dvd a good way to save my mp3s or not?

Make sure you backup

Reply #19 – 2006-02-07 00:54:36

Quote

I have a 75gb collection of mp3s. I've only backed up two DVD's worth so far. I only want to back them up when i have them all tagged properly, so it takes time. I'm not to worried about my HD crashing, but I know it could happen. So is dvd a good way to save my mp3s or not?
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Perhaps you can try [a href="http://www.quickpar.org.uk/]QuickPar[/url] to add some error-correction redundancy, in case your DVD gives you errors.

Make sure you backup

Reply #20 – 2006-02-10 01:28:38

I so agree with backing up now, I tried installing some new mem but my motherboard fried, which meant I had to reinstall Windows XP and format my old hard drive as it was a bit buggy. I lost a shit load of music mostly Essential Mixes and Hybrid sets, but I can download them again and back them up. And yes Bobjua DVD's are fine to put MP3's on. My Pioneer DVD player can play them as well.

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