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Just find somewhere big to backup...
Authored by: adrianm on Feb 08, '06 07:48:05AM
I back up my purchased tunes online. Chances are, when I need to recover my files/tunes, it will be because the house burned down, so writing to CD/DVD is not much good, so:
  1. Find a cheap online hosting provider with lots of space - I use dreamhost, for $7.95 a month you get 20GB of space (I've created a voucher code Y50UK that will give anyone $50 off too).
  2. Ensure you have a shell account (you do with dreamhost).
  3. Use launchd, cron or your favourite timed script runner to execute a script like this:
    
    #!/bin/sh
    cd /Users/yourname/Music/iTunes/
    mdfind -onlyin /Users/yourname/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/ 'kMDItemFSName == "m4p"w || kMDItemFSName =="m4v"w || kMDItemFSName =="mp4"w' | \
    rsync -av --files-from=- / shellusername@host.server.com:
    

Disclaimer: I have no connection to dreamhost other than being a very happy customer.

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Just find somewhere big to backup...
Authored by: macslut on Feb 08, '06 08:44:33AM

That's kinda expensive when you start thinking about the price over 1 year or more. My solution was to buy a second hard drive. I keep one at home and then one at the office. The advantage here is that it's cheaper long term and I get the benefit of being able to listen to my music at work (or I can take it when I travel). Plus my iTunes library is 400GB, so it's a huge advantage to do it this way.



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Just find somewhere big to backup...
Authored by: adrianm on Feb 08, '06 09:50:05AM

If you've bought 400GB of DRM encrypted music from ITMS, you can certainly afford $7.95 a month :)

Everything else, of course, you ripped from your CDs so can always re-rip at a push.



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Just find somewhere big to backup...
Authored by: ptone on Feb 09, '06 11:34:20AM

This is a good idea (and nice script), but watch out for really slow upload speed from most cable modems.

I rsync my whole home folder to a server at work while on a fast LAN and it can still take a while.

-P



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Just find somewhere big to backup...
Authored by: adrianm on Feb 10, '06 06:31:12AM

Hmm, just spotted that dreamhost supports Apple File Protocol (AFP) so you don't even have to deal with the iDisk-like weirdness of webdav.



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