Maybe it's just me, but it seems as though your backup technology is a little dated. Using CD-Rs is a pain, not to mention that CD-Rs go bad more often then they should. My solution would be to buy two 100 GB drives. Put all your MP3s on these, and have them be mirror images of eachother. I'm not sure how big your music collection is but for some reason I think this should suffice. Assuming a large 10 MB per song, and assuming 20 tracks per CD (yeah right), you could fit ~500 CDs on the drive. I'm not sure how many CDs you have, but if you had more CDs you could go with 200 GB drives, and fit ~1000 CDs.

It would be much easier to search and manage, and I doubt that the drives would die. They would just be backup, and I find that drives which aren't used a lot tend not to die. And even then, they wouldn't both die at the same time.

It would probably be more expensive, but would save you tons of frustration from having to deal with CDRs

Personally, I don't trust hard drives for backups -- even mirrored. I like having CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R etc copies on a more "permanent" and portable backup format.

I agree that using CD-Rs is dated but they are still being used a lot out there. CD-Rs are popular, cheap and MP3 CD-Rs play in hardware players like DVD players and car stereos.

CD-Rs have limited capacity but if I used DVD-Rs I'd have the same kinds problems finding my music. Having the ability to hold *more* music per DVD-R could make individual discs even harder to manage, in a way.

I'm curious Kibbee: how do you manage your music collection?

For my CDs, well, I don't back them up. I'm just kind of careful with them. I long for the day when they start putting music on something more robust, like a MiniDisc. As far as MP3s go, yes I do download some, I keep them on one drive, no backups. I didn't pay for them, and don't care if I lose them. I've lost them twice before.

You seem to be really hardcore about backing up your CDs. However it seems as though you are using the backups as more then just backups. You are using them to tote around and play in various devices. If your looking for pure backup, I think that hard drives are the way to go. If your looking for something that you can bring with you, and play on any device, maybe CD-Rs are the way to go. However, I think that the original CDs fit this niche very well.

In the age of the iPod, original CDs are not a very practical medium. My problem is that I like a lot of music and a lot of variety.

To carry around CD jewel cases is a real pain if they only have one album on them. If they have 8-10 albums on them, that's better. If I had an iPod with 100 albums on it, even better. But an iPod is just a hard drive, not a backup format ... I'd still transfer files between my backups, my iBook and my iPod.

I actually don't use my backup CD-Rs to play music. I use them for long-term storage so I don't have to keep that older music on my hard drives. Then if I want to listen to an old album I transfer it to my iBook and listen to it in iTunes.

So my CD-Rs are only used for backups. I treat them like gold, since they are my only backup copies. I wouldn't want to use them to play from often because they might get damaged.

You seem to be contradicting yourself a lot. Basically the reasons that you stated for using CDRs over a hard drive that (A) You can play them on a variety of devices, and (B) You trust a single CDR more than you trust a mirrored hard drive.

For (A), you just stated that you don't use these CDRs for anything except back-up, and if you want to listen to them, then you just copy them onto some other format. Also, you don't use them because of contradicting (B), because you don't trust them, and have to treat them like gold.

For (B), you stated that you treat the backups like gold because you are so afraid of something happening to them. You only have one backup, it would suck if something were to happen to it. You wouldn't have to worry so much about this with hard drives, since touching them the wrong way, or leaving them in the sun, usually doesn't affect them at all. Mind you, some times they just die for no reason at all, but this happens with CDRs too.

Actually I never said that I used CD-Rs so that I could play them on a variety of devices. All I said was that there is hardware out there that supports MP3 CD-Rs, and that CD-Rs are popular with other people, not just me.

As for (B): that's why I don't leave my CD-Rs in the sun. They are in a nice safe place. I use my hard drives all of the time for a variety of things and my CD-Rs backups very little. For me *personally* the chances of a hard drive failure are much higher especially given the age of my hard drives and how much churn they go through. CD-R backups mitigate that risk.

CD-Rs are also cheaper if you take care of them. Probably not cheaper per MB but cheaper in terms of a single investment of cash. I don't have to lay down $100 or more to backup my collection on CD-R and I've had those CD-Rs for years.

Anyway, I hope that clears that up.

It clears things up a little. However your reason for not using hard drives still aludes me. Basically your saying that with the amount of use your hard drives get, that you don't trust them. But what i'm saying is get some new hard drives, which are only used for backup, and therefore used much less frequently.

Also, about the cost factor, I don't get it. You can either spend $200 now for 2 hard drives, or put down $0.50, for every cd you want to burn. and then have to make sure it wrote correctly every time, and check them all every month to make sure they haven't started to go bad. which could be a lengthy process. It could be much more automated if it was all on one drive.

Anyway, I'm just playing devil's advocate. I don't really care how you backup your music. Do whatever you feel works for you. I'm just offering what I think would be a better solution, since using CDRs seems to be a very painful process where keeping track of which disc contains which songs is the major problem. By putting it all on one disk, you resolve this problem.

If we carry this problem forward 10 years, you are still going to be putting stuff on CDR, or DVDR. Your problem with organizing them will get even bigger and bigger. With hard drives, you will eventually run out of space. But by then, 500 GB hard drives will cost $100, and you can just quickly transfer, reusing the old drives for something else, or donating them to the less fortunate.