True, no arguing about that. I just wanted to point out that no music is really, really lost yet. Unlike with the Library of Alexandria, if the community wishes so, it is still possible to rebuild it. Even making it more, uh, fire-resistant.
I already have a personal archive that is probably larger than the library of Alexandria. If this kind of stuff matters to you get a hard drive and start your own today. Once it gets large enough, put it on a NAS with RAID5 and a hot spare.
Agreed, two is one and one is none. I say some sort of RAID as I have read it might be somewhat preventive of bit rot. I hope for my archive to last generations, unfortunately it does not appear that any current storage technology will permit this yet. Write once media like CD's and DVD's and Blu-rays apparently won't last the decade from what I've heard.
You seem to be serious about this, but rather vague on the details, so I wanted to reply, just in case. If you don't already know about ZFS, please look into it. A properly provisioned server with ECC RAM and a ZFS RAID6 will provide the best possible defense for your archive in the years (or decades?) to come. Current filesystems don't come close.
If this is all new to you, look at FreeNAS for a "turnkey" solution. As well as being a solid piece of software, their guides can help you configure the necessary hardware.
And if you can afford it, you really should use RAID 6.
The amount of RAID 5 arrays I've seen die during the rebuild process (because one of the other drives, with an equal level of wear of the failed drive, failed due to the increased IO) is non-zero.
If you have the drives, of course. Also try to obtain your drives from different retailers if possible. They have bad lots from time to time. Getting the drives off different pallets is cheap insurance.
I started a long time ago. Still don't have many awesome stuff that was on what.cd. And there's much more I don't even know about yet, which probably also was on what.cd already. To continue using our metaphor, a vast personal book collection is still less than a real public library. It's still a lot about sharing. I'm proud of my collection, but in terms of significance it's not comparable to that of entire what.cd, not to say the Library of Alexandria.
That said, we still should think about fire-resistant public libraries, not just personal collections.
Not good enough. RAID6 is the absolute minimum, as with current disk sizes it's too easy to lose the whole array due to an additional disk failure while one disk is being replaced.
