[kiss*kiss]

I have a 4gig Nano (used to own a 20gig iPod but never went close to using 8gigs) and have found that I am pretty much using up all the space to store my music and now have to delete some songs in order to add new ones...

So I've been storing full album mp3s on a DVD using a drag and drop program and all was well until the program screwed up and erased EVERYTHING I had been storing on there for several months. (I like keeping full albums even though I don't listen to every song because sometimes I end up going back through the album and find a song I like or am in the mood for.)

The loss of my HUGE digital full album music collection has led me to the conclusion(s) that I need to either A) start storing my music on an external hard drive, find a better program to drag and drop files... or just nix the drag and drop and burn them permanently, or C) by a bigger iPod and just store ALL my music on it since I haven't EVER had music lost/erased on it by accident. I'm thinking a 30gig or 20gig video iPod would be nice...

What do you guys think? Do you have any other suggestions?

[res0nate]

Just stick w/an internal / external drive. Using an ipod as pure storage over the usual back up purposes is risky considering that a random error could force you to format the pod (then again, same thing can happen to a drive)

Burning media becomes nothing but a hassle, especially if you're looking for a particular album and happen to have spindles of discs lying around.

[kiss*kiss]

Just stick w/an internal / external drive. Using an ipod as pure storage over the usual back up purposes is risky considering that a random error could force you to format the pod (then again, same thing can happen to a drive)

Burning media becomes nothing but a hassle, especially if you're looking for a particular album and happen to have spindles of discs lying around.

Good point.

But seeing as to how an iPod and external hard drive (I wouldn't use the internal hard drive of my computer) are both susceptible to a random error... what would make me choose one over the other?

I guess price would be one factor (a hard drive being slightly cheaper), but an iPod video will let me watch shows on it and is portable. Heh.

I'm still stuck.

[res0nate]

A price of what, a 30g pod = 300+ storage hd? I guess for me, I'd rather put up w/a few minutes of xferring albums in and out over deleting things on a hard drive.

Just assuming you don't have much hd space in the first place w/all the archiving on dvd. If that's the case, just get the hd. Or else you'll run into the problem of not having enough standard space and the trouble of burning dvds.

[dot1q]

Get an external hard drive and keep a copy on there as well. Regardless of whether you personally never had experience losing data on an Ipod, it can happen and keeping the data in one location is just as unsafe. If you really want to make sure you never lose your music, you want to back it up to a second location. I personally have over 400GB of music and I make a backup copy to an external hard drive on a daily basis or whenever I add a large amount of files. It also saves me the effort of making backup dvd's as they are time consuming to make and I have to keep track of which files were backed up and which werent. There are tons of commercial and free file replication software out there so when you do backups daily, it will synchronize automatically and only copy over the new files you added (so it won't take forever to copy everything over again).

I use robocopy, which is a command line file copying utility provided as part of Windows Vista. You can download a version for XP by downloading the XP Resource Kit from Microsoft's website. It's simple and it get's the job done. I backup/synchronize about 1.5 TB of data a day and it takes about 30 minutes on average to synch/day. It runs in the background and I don't even notice it running. It's a lot more reassuring to know that my data is backed up.

[DKYang]

You should NOT use the iPod for storage, or any player for that matter. It is not recommended to do so.

Buy an 250 GB (or you choose) internal hard drive and install it, they don't cost a lot, probably around $50 depending on where you buy it.
Buy an external hard drive, the My Book (Western Digital) or Seagate.

If you can organize your music, buy a bunch of blank CDs. Good one's, don't get the crappy ones that are really cheap. Use a big case to organize and store them. Which will probably cost around $30 depending on price, but a lot more work than just transferring to another hard drive.

Btw, what program were you using?

[kiss*kiss]

^I was using Iomega HotBurn Pro it came with the external DVD player/recorder that my dad had. I'm NEVER using it again.

Thanks for all the replies/suggestions. Even though I was itching to get a video iPod, I think I'll wait on that and go for an external hard drive (not internal, so I could use it with my desktop and notebook) as suggested by the majority for now.

[BishieAddict]

I use robocopy, which is a command line file copying utility provided as part of Windows Vista. You can download a version for XP by downloading the XP Resource Kit from Microsoft's website. It's simple and it get's the job done. I backup/synchronize about 1.5 TB of data a day and it takes about 30 minutes on average to synch/day. It runs in the background and I don't even notice it running. It's a lot more reassuring to know that my data is backed up.

1.5TB in 30 mins? whoa.. that's awesome.. hmm. my external HD has a quick backup function. lol perhaps i should use it for once.

[dot1q]

^ It only takes 30 minutes because most of the data is already at the destination and the application is only synchronizing new and/or changed files. The point I wanted to make was that if you use any kind of file replication/synchronization software, the backup is a lot quicker and you don't have to deal with organizing what has and hasn't been backed up. When the synch completes, I know I have an exact duplicate as the source without having to re-copy everything again.

[awdark]

I prefer the backup music on the separate drive and long term archive things onto DVDr disks. It is a pain to find files off disks... but they are great for archive.

yeah yeah you can go into the disk damage, oxidization of the dye etc etc but I basically have 2 copies so shouldnt be too bad.

Oh yeah... you know how your disk failed? It was on DVD-R disks right? You can actually use software like ISObuster to just read the files off the disk still it probably just messed up the table of content but should still be okay.