On Sun, 19 Nov 2006, Peter Gordon wrote:
On Sun, 2006-11-19 at 12:26 -0500, Max Pyziur wrote:
In my case, I've ditched 90% of my LPs in favor of mp3s. [...]
Just a side note here: Your best bet in this case is to store them all
losslessly, such as in FLAC. The MP3 format, while also having patent
and other legal concerns, earns its high compression ratio by discarding
much of the extreme parts of the music data as well as using other
algorithms to create a file that is much smaller and sounds the same,
but is not. FLAC, however, is lossless: When uncompressed, it is the
EXACT bit-for-bit PCM and other data of your audio file.
However, for most people, high-bitrate lossy formats such as MP3 and Ogg
Vorbis are "Good Enough(tm)" in that one cannot easily distinguish the
difference between the encoded audio and the original track without
probably-very-expensive audio hardware.
For general backup purposes, I use rsync to copy my entire home
directory, various configuration files in /etc, and other important data
to a secondary and larger hard disk whose sole purpose is storage of
this material. It suits my needs well enough. If you're more paranoid
about data loss (such as for production systems in a workplace
environment or similar) you may want to look into keeping multiple
off-site copies of the data as well.
"Before the rain; before the rain ..."
Much thanks to all for the recommendations. Looks as though rsync wins
hands down, feet up.
Max
pyz@xxxxxxxxx
Hope that helps.
--
Peter Gordon (codergeek42)
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