[Galicarnax]

> Does it suck to maintain almost 200GB of audio files? Yes.

In what way does is suck? I have about 1TB of audio files on local disks, which I manage with beets + mpd. No troubles at all.

[whartung]

It sucks having to maintain the drives, prevent the bit rot, restoring them from backup when the drive(s) fail, paying for, installing, maintaining the technology black hole that you fall down into trying to mitigate all of the above from happening in the first place.

Right now, for me, its an external SSD drive and I have a Blaze backup that, in theory, when it works, when it hasn't decided to not backup for a week, preserves it all up in the cloud for me, while my Time Machine manages my main system drive locally.

I dread the day I'll have to restore all of this when the inevitable disaster strikes, but I SHOULD be protected (knock on wood).

[Dylan16807]

> It sucks having to maintain the drives, prevent the bit rot, restoring them from backup when the drive(s) fail

It fits on one drive, so you can do all that with a few minutes of effort once every two or three years. Or just when you change drives, even less often.

> paying for, installing, maintaining the technology black hole that you fall down into trying to mitigate all of the above from happening in the first place.

Is that more than having a backup? You'd better be doing that anyway.

You could go fancy and set up Z-RAID but if you're really inclined to do that you'd probably already have it set up for your main files and then dumping the music on top is near zero effort.

[chunk_waffle]

> In what way does is suck?

There is a non-zero amount of "care and feeding" that goes into it.

For example:

Moving them around and re-indexing. I recently copied my library onto an SD card for a new phone, which had a new media player, which then had to re-index them all. As I add new songs to the main dataset, I'll have to sync them over to the phone.

I also manage a Koel instance so I can stream the files from wherever I want. But I like the ability to have them offline as well. And Koel is great but, if I ever decide to move to another utility I'll probably lose playlists or have to convert them over.

Ripping CDs, then moving files over to the main dataset takes time, not a lot but it is a thing. Also I have no shortage of CDs with incorrect metadata in the CD databases or don't exist in the CD databases. Or often there are multiple matches and I have to find the right one.

Scanning the CD album art which I've done for some rarer albums in which I could not find artwork for online (or what I did find was blurry and over compressed)

Managing metadata: For example, I've some CDs that were ripped as "TALKING HEADS", others as "Talking Heads". It's a little more painful with Japanese character sets e.g. "Tatsuro Yamashita" vs "山下 達郎".

If I purchase albums from providers like BandCamp or Ototoy, I then need to make sure the metadata matches what I've decided to go with.

I use ZFS with redundancy, and take regular snapshots but I also make occasional backups to external drives but I could also use something like S3 as well.

This is really a hobby at this point, not a convenience. With a streaming provider you fork over a few bucks a month and listen to whatever they have in their library.

[kilolima]

Have you taken a look at Syncthing? I use it to sync the desktop music directory (~300Gb) with the phone's microSD card. For external storage or cloud backups, I just use rsync. It's all pretty trivial once it's setup.

[doubled112]

Once they're there, they're there.

I don't know what ongoing maintenance there would be after the initial import.

Backups? Automate them. Integrity checks? Use a better file system.