Karaoke Forums

I had a KJ tell me that he puts all his songs on an external hard drive, then backs that drive up with another external hard drive, and has none of his songs on his laptop. I downloaded my songs onto my laptop using KMA files at 128Kb compression ratio, then backed up my internal hard drive with a 500 GB WD External Hard Drive, incase my laptop crashes. Am i doing this right? How do all of you guys using hoster do it, or doesn't it really matter? advantages disadvantages? thanks in advance.

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Sweet Little Me In Karaokeland........

In my tower I have an internal drive for the operating system & program & another internal drive for the music files only.

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

oh i see..well i only have one internal drive in my laptop as far as i know..??? so what would you suggest, leave well enough alone? or put all the songs from my laptop to an External hard drive, and clear them all out of my laptop?

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Sweet Little Me In Karaokeland........

The only thing on my laptop is the Operating system and the Hosting program.  Everything else is deleted.  It will never be on the internet either.  No chance for a virus.  No chance for another un-needed program messing anything up.

I want nothing to interfere with the operation of the internal hard drive.  All of my music is on an external hard drive backed up with another external hard drive.

Eliminate all the possiblilties for a failure.

I think it is fine to have your songs on your internal harddrive as long as you keep a backup copy on an external harddrive (as you stated you did).
I keep my songs on my laptop internal and 2 backups on 2 external harddrives...reason being 2 months into my ripping process I lost everything due to harddrive failure (did not have a backup then)
Learned my lesson the hard way!

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Music speaks to the heart in ways words cannot express.

What will you do if the internal hard drive craps out?

You lose everything.  You have no operating system or music.

Now what?

If he copied the songs to an external drive then he would still have the music.

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The Line Array Experiment is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

No operating system, no show.

Then you buy a new operating system drive (either internal or external), load it with the operating system & reloads Hoster - point it to the external drive & he's back in business.  Less than 1 day down.  
I keep all my discs at my show so if my computer crashes - even for a minute, I can get the next song cued up & playing without having to wait a couple minutes to reboot (or worse).

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

I guess I don't follow you ....whether or not the music is stored on the internal harddrive, if the hardrive craps out, yes then, you are correct...no operating system-no show....has no bearing on if the songs are also on the internal or not. If you read my post I stated I keep 2 separate backups of my music on 2 separate external harddrives.



But have you eliminated all the possibilities for a failure?
It seems to me if your hardrive craps out (with the operating system on it) you are
also in the same boat....No operating system, no show.

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Music speaks to the heart in ways words cannot express.

Until i pull out my back up laptop and in 10 minutes i'm back up and running.


Why do you want to clutter up the internal hard drive?  That takes away from the speed of the operating and hosting system.

You can have all the music back ups you want.  No backup Operating system and no show.  There is less chance for my internal hard drive to crap if it isn't filled with crap.  If somehow i were to get a virus on my music hard drive the Operating system could still survive.

Some great things to think about i guess. I don't go online with my laptop either. Except of course for my Hoster updates. Sounds like most of you keep your songs on the externals. Then make a copy of your external to another external? does this take special software? And i do have an external Plextor CD drive i got from MTU to do0wnload all my songs to begin with. Any help is certainly appreciated, i just want to make sure i'm doing this right. I would sure hate to have to rip all my songs all over again!

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Sweet Little Me In Karaokeland........

No you don't need any special software, you just use whatever file managment program u usually use... Windows Explorer (or whatever Mac uses) and copy the files to ur external.  Then if you want to just use ur external to run ur show from, you are free to delete the files off of ur lap top's internal drive.  Just make sure that you have at least 1 back up of ur files somewhere besides what you use for your show.  

I have 2 external hard drives, but I occasionally use both for the shows because I need to go get a bigger external but don't have the cash yet.  I'm getting ready to back all of my files up on CD (in a data format) as an extra precautionary thing.  That is why I asked about the duplicate removal program in another topic.  I'd rather not waste the space on CD's with duplicates if I don't have to.  Then as I get new stuff, I can back up those particular files and so on.

I agree with sidewinder in that the less stuff you have on ur internal hard drive, the less likely it is to have ur internal crash.  You are at a higher risk of a hard drive crash if you have more than half of ur internal full of data.  I use a 250G and it's just over half full with both Karaoke and DJ music on it.  Thus why I would like to upgrade to a 500G external.

Hope this was helpful, and made sense.

Poppycock.


You don't get virus infections on a data drive and not on the computer it is attached to.

There is no reason not to have your music files on the laptop drive. Obviously they should be backed up, but other than data storage concerns there are no performance or reliability downsides of any significance at all.

I agree with mckyj57...if you have a 2 car garage and also have 2 cars, why not park them both in the garage.
The music files are just sitting there until you call upon one to be played.

Having a backup laptop is a good idea, I'll agree with you on that sidewinder.  

Back to karaoke for foods last post,,,a great and free software program for keeping your song file backup hardrives in synch is File Synchronizer from Latshaw Systems.

http://www.latshawsystems.com/ProductDe ... nizer.aspx

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Music speaks to the heart in ways words cannot express.

Why do you want to take any power away from the operating system or the host program by having the music on the same drive?

Get your host program updates on a different computer and only put it on the laptop after the virus scan.  No need for virus protection on the show laptop slowing things down or conflicting with anything.

I want my internal HD as clean as possible.  Do what you want, i'll keep mine uncluttered.

Does it cause more internal heat if the hard drive is busier constantly searching for internal files?

Heat kills laptops.


I have Norton on my desk top.  There is something on it that keeps turning off the firewall and Norton can't find it.  My show laptop will never see the internet.  That's asking for major trouble.  Especially if you don't have a back up laptop.

The files take no power once they are stored. You aren't taking any power away at all.


No. The drive is spinning anyway if you are doing anything substantive. Head motion uses very little power, and don't think that the USB interface comes free.

Once a file is stored, it takes zero power. And if you have an anti-virus program that scans every file of every type completely every time, then you have one from 1996. Even then, you can specify file extensions that should not be scanned.

I am willing to bet you are not a computer expert. Please cite a competent authority which advises you to use as little of your internal disk as possible and using an external disk to reduce power consumption and increase reliability.

I think you will find that attaching the external disk to your system is a much greater source of possible problems than using the internal drive.

You just stated your problem right there... you're using Norton [period].  But that is a different topic.

Nice!
I am one of the "computer experts" that keeps their C drive as small as possible and don't use it any more than it has to. I don't go online with my show pc, and don't allow strange usb interfaces (customers) to hook up to it. I have a second hard drive that has my music and karaoke and video, and run off it. Since this is internal, there is no problem, but even having my external via usb, I never noticed a single problem. I PERSONALLY feel to leave the C drive alone, and to just let it be the OS and my karaoke player. While you may feel this is poppycock, please rest assured that while doing this for as many years as I have, I've not had ONE problem with the show pc.

There are More than ONE ways to do ANYTHING, and just because you don't agree with it, doesn't mean that your way is the "right" way.

I don't have many programs lurking and running around in the background sucking up processor power.  Building up extra heat.

I'm still not putting all my karaoke eggs in one basket.  Asking for trouble and maybe going home without a nights money from total system failure.

How can a clean (uncluttered) hard drive become more of a problem?