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General => Beyond MusicBee => Topic started by: psychoadept on September 07, 2016, 10:08:54 PM

Title: Bleep bleepity bleep!
Post by: psychoadept on September 07, 2016, 10:08:54 PM
Don't mind me, I'm just venting.

Weekend before last, my laptop suddenly wouldn't boot into Windows anymore.  Annoying, but I had recent backups so I just shipped it off for repairs rather than waste time trying to salvage anything.

I got it back yesterday, and they had replaced the whole hard drive.  Okay, fine. After getting a few essentials reinstalled, I started copying my Music backup into the correct location and went to bed.  This morning, I got MusicBee restored, and when I loaded up the library file, almost 20 GB of files were missing!  That's about 10% of my collection.  I checked the backup, and it's missing there, too.  Ack!

I didn't have a lot of time to look into it, but at a glance I couldn't see any pattern to it.  Some is whole albums, some is single tracks, all over the alphabet... and I searched to be sure the files hadn't just ended up with a different filename for some reason, but I couldn't find anything that way either. 

About half was from my library and half was from the inbox.  I haven't even checked my audiobooks or podcasts yet.  I'm not looking forward to trying to track it all down again, but mostly I hope none of it was irreplaceable.

Sigh...
Title: Re: Bleep bleepity bleep!
Post by: phred on September 07, 2016, 10:57:27 PM
I feel your pain. At least you have (somewhat of a) backup.

Reports have shown the a majority of 'home' users do not back up at all. And about half of the business don't run backups either. But what's more surprising (to me) is that of those who do backups, less than 10% actually -test- the backup to make sure the data can be restored.

My music files are backed up every overnight from the NAS where they live to a stand-alone hard drive in one of my desktop machines. Once I week I test it to make sure it can be restored.

Another computer in the house is used by my wife for work. If anything gets lost on that machine, I'm the one who will be in the doghouse. Her work can not be easily replaced. Therefore there are three backups a day run on that machine. And once a week, I test all three of them to make sure I can restore should things go into the crapper.

A word to the wise.
Title: Re: Bleep bleepity bleep!
Post by: psychoadept on September 08, 2016, 03:43:08 AM
Yeah... I restored my backups several times earlier this year and they were fine then. Not sure what happened.  It's possible that the missing files are related to why my computer stopped working in the first place.

The good news is that my roommate had an OLD version of my collection on an external drive.  The bad news is that that drive is also on the fritz right now... but may yet be recoverable.  Some things I can re-rip, or even nab directly from my dad's collection, too. And the vast majority of what's in my library is also on my phone, but if it was above 192k it's been downgraded.

Definitely a cautionary tale.
Title: Re: Bleep bleepity bleep!
Post by: psychoadept on September 08, 2016, 03:30:58 PM
I got the missing tracks in an excel sheet this morning for easier managing.  It's a little over 2500 items; could be a lot worse.  The bad news is that some of it is old podcasts that aren't available anymore.  Cross your fingers for me that the external drive can be brought back to life!
Title: Re: Bleep bleepity bleep!
Post by: alec.tron on September 08, 2016, 11:58:25 PM
Fingers crossed here!

I'm just dealing with a bug from Serato that overwrote metadata where it wasn't supposed to of 6k files (i.e. semicolon separated multi value metadata it did not like and truncated it down to the first value before the semicolon... there's a thread and a support ticket, in case anyone wants to chime in...). So now I'm spending my man-flu day with writing a little python snippet to inject the old metadata from backups into the analyzed data (for accurate bpm & musical key info) as to not to throw away the 24hrs it took to analyze those 6k flac files...

/rant
how come music software used to be state of the art in digital file processing & handling in the 90s (NI Reaktor blew my mind...), and nowadays every DJ/DVS system feels like a half-baked toy full of bugs when one is used to professional/powerfull/customizeable/scriptable software from other areas...
/rant off

c.
Title: Re: Bleep bleepity bleep!
Post by: psychoadept on September 09, 2016, 02:39:49 AM
Oy.  I feel for you.  Thank goodness for automation, at least.
Title: Re: Bleep bleepity bleep!
Post by: insertrealname on September 13, 2016, 05:35:47 AM
I've had good experiences of restoring files backed up by Bvckup2 (https://bvckup2.com/).

The genius of this "simple" piece of software is that it makes a simple mirror of whatever folder trees it's been set up to copy, and that it can be set up to automatically do that as soon as an external drive is plugged in (using USB hardware IDs).

It copies only those parts of a file that have changed, so if only 1% of a file has changed, e.g. metadata edited, Bvckup2 works out what needs to be changed in the current backup target to create an exact current copy, and thus backup completes very quickly once the initial copy has been made (deleted files in the source can be automatically archived in the destination as well, so nothing gets lost).

I have three external drives of various sizes, and I've set up Bvckup2 so that copies of files I care about are on at least two of them, and the program runs as a service in the background (with a program UI to control it), so that just plugging in a drive gets backups done without manual intervention.

It does not handle restoration; for that I use simple robocopy.exe on the command line.
Title: Re: Bleep bleepity bleep!
Post by: Freddy Barker on March 13, 2017, 05:42:37 PM
Hi Guys.......

A friend lost EVERYTHING, including old and unreplaceable scanned family photos, when a laptop went faulty beyond repair, with NO backup !!

Since then, I've been OCD about making regular backups.
Laptop A has my MusicBee Media Player and contains 7.3k music files and 25k photos.
Laptop B holds copies of everything, (as does a portable USB HDD).
Almost everytime changes are made on Laptop A, I run FreeFile Sync to copy just the files that have been changed.
MusicBee database also backed up to Dropbox.
Once set up, 1 click scans for differences and 1 click performs the backup.

Just to be certain, all music is backed up to Google Music!

http://www.freefilesync.org (http://www.freefilesync.org) - Synchronize Files and Folders like for like.

Best regards  :D