Backing up FLAC files

How do you guys do it?

I tried to back mine up to a Samba server by simply copying them to the server and found that a lot of them can't be copied to a Network drive because of the invalid file names. I.e. having spaces ' ( " and other symbols in the CD track names. Obviously these names are fine as FLAC or MP3 files. So how do you manage it?

 

my backup is a wardrobe full of cd's - but there are various programmes that will bulk rename files allowing you to replace spaces with _ or .

 

I may have to use your solution Julian. It's not just spaces, there are other characters as well. I tried copying to another directory in the same PC and it worked, so I'm thinking a USB drive may work. I can hopefully borrow one from a colleague and try it.

 

A USB hard disk will certainly work. I have 2 of them. One for the music and one for a backup of the music.

 

Thanks for the confirmation Chris.

 

Hi Dev, NAS drives do not like long file names or names with certain characters. I think its because they are formatted in FAT, which they need to be to work as a NAS.

I recommend something like a LAcie brick, they are quick, quiet, attractive and cheap.

 

Cheers Gary, they seem a bit cheaper than the makes I was considering.

 

Yes, I use a couple of LaCies - one for backup is 500 GB. One has an option when first buying it to format as either FAT or NTFS. Files are a mixture of ALE (m4a) and mp3. I use a free utility from the microsoft wesite called synctoy, FWIW. This has a number of copying options (via USB ports) such as echo, contribute, subscribe. I use contribute so that changes and additions are written but removals are not deleted from the backup. It's not a true backup program but it seems to do what I want so far.

 

That sounds useful