Upgrade to iTunes Music Library
Jerry and Will go to Fry’s
Before Will left for college we reorganized our mp3 collection. He and I both put a full copy of our music (about 100 gb combined) on external hard drives. Mine got plugged into an iBook running iTunes which became the music library on our network, (Wills got plugged into his desktop computer at college and became his shared library on the HMC network.)
When I ripped a CD or downloaded a file I loaded it into iTunes on my powerbook and then copied it over to the iBook and loaded it into iTunes there. That way I was backed up if one or the other of these machines died. The idea was that when Will came home at Christmas we’d back up his library to mine and my library to his so that if either one of our libraries was lost we’d have a copy. Also, that way we each got a copy of the music picked up in the interim by the other.
During Will’s first term I picked up about 50 gb of new music. He picked up about 100 gb. Unfortunately the external hard drive connected to the iBook only held 200 gb. So we needed more storage…
We went to Fry’s to buy memory for the cameras we got for Christmas (hence the gallery .) While we were there we bought a 2 terabyte network attached storage device made by Buffalo. (Remember the Snapserver?) It has four 500 gb drives set up in a Raid 5 array giving 1.5 tb of usable space. I hope that will get us through college.
When we got home Will plugged it into the network and it chose an IP address ending in .9 that conflicted with the address of the webserver. It also came with a windows-only setup utility. Eventually Will found the web interface and changed the address to something out of our normal range. Then he had to reset the DHCP lease on the webserver to put it back where it belonged. Finally we were back in business and we could copy the contents of the external drive to the new music library. It said that it would take 18 hours but it took longer than that. It also turned out that adding stuff (and editing stuff) in a 250 gb iTunes library takes a long time, expecially when you’re doing it across the network. We relocated the Buffalo to my powerbook so that we didn’t have to connect to it through the router and that seemed to speed things up some – but it is still slower than a USB external drive.
(Odette hasn’t seen how much it cost yet, but the mere mention of a trip to Fry’s distresses her.)
***UPDATE****
The network worked without a hitch until Will came home for the summer. In order to get faster downloads from a bit torrent client that wasn’t behind the firewall he installed Azureus on the server with a web interface. A few days later the server crashed and its file system became corrupted. Maybe it was only a coincidence.
In any event, in the process of rebuilding the website from inadequate backups we bought him a 2TB buffalo for his music so that he could give up three or four external hard drives for use in the back-up system on the server. Now he and I will actually be able to mirror our music collections and he will be able to share his music and video from a single volume.