Best Way to Back up Music Library

[gnomus]

(03-06-2015 16:09)DavidHB Wrote:  ...
Good luck. As you are starting from scratch, in the worst case you can always delete and start again. Don't hesitate to ask about any issues that arise.

David

I will update for those who may be thinking of using SyncToy and who may, like me, not be all that savvy with these things.

It was quite interesting running the program - I found that there were many more files that needed "overwriting" than I expected (around a 1,000). At first, I thought these must be corrupted in some way, until I worked out why they were being updated...... Up until now, when I have discovered minor tagging errors, I have corrected the errors separately in each of the 4 locations that I have saved the music library. So if I had to change something in the "Life on Mars.flac" file on the Synology, I would also have to change the same thing on the hard disks where my library is copied. Of course, this mean that, even though the "music" in the file is identical, the files themselves are not the same since the time they were last altered is different (by a minute or so). As far as I could tell, all of the files that needed to be overwritten were ones I had had to make tagging corrections to.

I like the fact that you can use SyncToy to "Preview" changes that would be made if you were to run the utility. I did this to compare the libraries on my Synology and my QNAP. Here, I found a lot of strange things. I found a lot of odd directories on the QNAP, some of which contained files. Virtually all of my music folders contain an @ea folder. Like this:

   

Inside this @ea folder I found:

   

As you can see, there is a folder for each of the tracks on the Magical Mystery Tour album. Within those folders there were jpg files. Here, for example, are the contents of the Strawberry Fields folder:

   

When I opened these, oddly named, jpg files, I found that they were simply the Magical Mystery Tour album art.

I don't know how to account for these - and I have many of them (thousands). I do recall that at one stage, before someone here (Simon) showed me the light, I was ripping CDs directly to the Synology, and then copying from there to my back up locations (such as the QNAP). I don't know if that might be the cause. I also don't know if I should work my way through my QNAP library deleting all of these @ea directories and their contents. Some of them are several megabytes in size

Does anyone have any thoughts?