DIY: Archiving your digital media

CNET shows you how to archive your digital media.

Tip 1: Back it up
Tip 2: Toss your CDs

Tip 1: Back it up

Second Copy is a utility that supports automatic, incremental backups.

Your music, movies and other media are no less important than your contact database and business documents, yet we often forget to include them in our backup plans. Even worse, many of us have no backup plan at all. That's dangerous. As any seasoned computer jockey will tell you, data loss is not a question of if  but when . And if you think backups are a hassle, weigh it against the tragedy of losing all of your music, photos, and videos.

There are plenty of ways to archive all this stuff: optical media (CDs and DVDs), external or secondary hard drives, and even media-friendly online backup services such as Streamload. Which option should you use? The safest answer is at least two of them, as it's always a good idea to have a backup of your backup. Copying your valuable files to a safe place can be a hassle, but you can make it easier on yourself by establishing a consistent backup interval -- say, once every one, three, or six months.

Let's start with Streamload. A free account nets you a whopping 25GB of online storage space. Just upload your files (be patient -- uploads tend to be much slower than downloads) and presto: a safe offsite backup you can access from any PC. The only hitch with the free account is that your download bandwidth is limited to 100MB per month. If disaster strikes and you need to retrieve all your files, you'll probably need to upgrade to one of the fee-based accounts, which start at US$4.95 per month for unlimited storage and a number of other options.

Backing up to a second hard drive is a fast and easy solution, especially if you use a utility that supports automatic, incremental backups; that is, at designated times, only those files that have changed or been added since the last backup will be copied to the drive. We recommend something along the lines of Second Copy, a favourite among Download.com users and a bargain at US$29.95. Keep in mind, however, that a backup hard drive is just as susceptible to mechanical failure (and, for that matter, virus and spyware infections) as your primary drive -- all the more reason to adopt more than one backup solution.

Finally, you can take advantage of the CD and/or DVD burner you already own. Blank media is cheap, especially in bulk, and a single CD can hold upward of 150 MP3s. Even if you have to span your files across multiple discs, it's still an easy way to create a physical (though not scratchproof) backup, since software can handle splitting up the files between the discs. The latest versions of Ahead Nero and Roxio Easy CD Creator include backup utilities for use with optical media. The aforementioned Second Copy works fine, too.

Tip 2: Toss your CDs

Apple iTunes users can rip CDs into the Apple Lossless format.

CDs are so 20th century. It's time to liberate your music from those scratch-prone, shelf-hogging, losable platters and turn it into pristine, eminently practical digital files. When you're done, you'll be able to transcode your songs into new formats as needed or even burn them back to CDs, with no loss of fidelity.

The secret is lossless compression. Typically, songs ripped from CDs end up as AAC, MP3, or WMA files, all of which are lossy  -- at least some song data has been stripped in order to make the files smaller. By ripping to a lossless format instead, the files still get compressed, but no sound quality is lost along the way. They're bit-for-bit duplicates of the originals that occupy about half the disk space.

As a result, you can pack your hard drive with CD-quality digital files that can be played, transcoded, or burned, all while keeping your source files intact. It's like having CDs without the CDs.

OK, but which lossless format should you choose? One option is to simply rip the uncompressed WAV files straight from your CDs, but they're huge -- upward of 50MB per song  -- and they can't be tagged with song, artist, album, and other desirable information. Another option is FLAC, a popular open-source codec, but most users will probably be better off with either Apple Lossless or WMA Lossless.

These two codecs, accessible within iTunes and Windows Media Player, respectively, let you play your tunes directly -- no extra decompression step required -- and copy them to portable players that support the formats (iPods support Apple Lossless, and certain PVPs from Creative, iRiver, Samsung, and others support Windows Lossless). Few desktop programs, and even fewer portables, support FLAC, although the Cowon iAudio X5 and the Sonos Digital Music System both do.

Given that iPods currently represent the lion's share of the MP3 players out there, here's how to rip your CDs to the Apple Lossless format:

1. Open iTunes.
2. Click Edit > Preferences, then click the Advanced tab followed by the Importing tab.
3. In the drop-down menu next to Import Using, select Apple Lossless Encoder. Check any of the accompanying options if desired. Then click OK.
4. Insert a CD and wait for iTunes to start importing it, or click the Import button at the upper right if you don't have iTunes set up to import CDs upon insertion.
5. Wait a few minutes while iTunes rips the CD to the Apple Lossless format. Wash, rinse, and repeat with your next CD until they're all ripped.