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General discussion

Best place for storage

Aug 28, 2005 7:53AM PDT

I am thinking of converting my cd's to mp3's and wanted to know the best place for storage. One would be the computer harddrive which is 160GB and 89% of the C drive is free. Or should I get a separate external drive to make sure they are safe. By the way I do have over 500 cd's. I have an Emachines T5026 with 760MB of ram,dvd burner,cd-rom,intel pentium 4 3.06. Thanks in advance.

Discussion is locked

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I would first think about
Aug 28, 2005 9:15AM PDT

converting your collection to lossless format like .Ape or .Flac or .Wavepack. Lossy (mp3) format is not a good choice for true backup.

You can burn them to DVD, where you would get about 5 to 10 cd's per disc. You can buy a external HD (big) and rip to it if you want also. Both DVD's and EX HD's are coming down in price all the time, so the choice is yours.

I have backed up some of my collection to DVD (Brand of DVD that is Made in Japan by TY). I rip them to a Wave image with EAC, then to Flac or Ape, scan the covers and Winrar them up on Store setting. This way I have a complete back up with no loss of quality.

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Both. You will probably have to use a hard drive for
Aug 28, 2005 2:02PM PDT

storage. All hard drives will fail eventually. You need to store them on two hard drives to have a reasonable chance of not losing anything. You could use one internal + one external, two internals, etc. I think one of my choices would be external. External storage would not be threatened if the computer failed.