I’ve begun the process of backing up my music collection. I’ve got most of it on my portable 60 GB harddrive in mp3 and ogg format. Since the drive is portable and I sometimes carry it in my backpack, I’m worried about losing it. So, I’ll be dumping all the music files onto 700 MB CD-ROMs in the coming days.
The harddrive collection is about 7.4 GB large. Some of this is duplicated in the original collection of 6 CD-ROMs that I brought with me to China two and a half years ago, but not all. So I need to figure out what exists on CD-ROM already and what needs to be backed up. Once this is done, I’ll be in a better position to estimate the true size of my music collection, both in terms of Gigabytes and in terms of minutes. The later should be an interesting figure.
Before I came to China in April 2002, I commissioned my friend Bruce to rip my entire CD collection to mp3. Taking up 6 CD-ROMs, this was a compact way to bring my music with me. Since that time, I’ve acquired more CDs. But it’s not all just album music. About 1 GB of the above figure consists of radio shows I’ve “taped” off of CJSR, having Bruce record them onto his harddrive so that I could download them to China. Another part of the collection consists of my childhood LPs that I first recorded onto minidisc and then recorded into mp3. I’ve since burned these albums onto audio CDs for my nieces to listen to. And lastly, I’ve got a growing collection of spoken word stuff, including lectures by Alan Watts and Ram Dass.
When I figure out the final statistics of my backed-up music collection, I’ll post the figures in a new entry.