I have had an online server I have used for a few years for all sorts of things. Cloud storage. Seedbox. And especially a media streaming server.
Outside of physical media — and, to a now much lesser degree, YouTube — that server was my media life. Fact is, with my music and its complicated curated playlists and metadata it was the heavy winner. I spent maybe a hundred hours working on it and that was ok because I spent a couple hours per day using it. Sometimes much more.
Only Kaz and I had noticed that it was starting to limp along here or there. Kicking connections. Having some trouble processing slightly larger files.
It was clearly having trouble. The people who run it were looking into it.
Last week it stuttered so hard it just stopped working except in random bursts. Then, yesterday I got the news that the drive(s) the server was on just crapped into dust.
In the arms of an angel…
I spent a few seconds just staring into space and then went: ok, let’s start rebuilding.
It was a bit later when I realized that it is nearly impossible to rebuild to its previous form. At least not without some long term struggle.
Let’s take the music: There were a few thousand songs on there. Artists were marked with their country of origin, moods, styles, and related artists. I had a few different tags that helped to build a few large, well-used, and ever-shifting playlists. I had manually gone through and added artist photos for every single artist in my collection. Some bios. I had rebuilt cover art to look better whether on the screen or on the phone. I had months and months of play data. I had hundreds and hundreds of songs with ratings out of five stars (including half stars) to help me sort through albums and getting just my favorites. I had stuff on there to analyze sound styles to bring up sonically similar songs. Different “radio” modes.
More than that. All that could played on my computer or TV or phone from the same database.
Even though I already have another such online drive in place and could relatively quickly upload the music I have on my computer, it would easily be August or September before I had reasonable chance to rebuild any major portion of that and stuff like the ratings and moods and seed playlists would never happen quite the same way again.
And it’s a good chunk my fault. I *should* have taken the time to set up a relatively simple script to back up the metadata. Just stored that off-site somewhere. The basic 1-2-3 rule: 1 place is very bad, 2 is better, 3 is best. I got sloppy and now I’m paying for it.
Even some self-recriminations don’t make up for those moments I remember stuff that I had built up like a digital packrat for years and sorted joyously.
As of right now, I have no plans to build up music on this iteration of the drive. I’m going to get some of the video content back in place and leave it there for a bit. I’ll make sure everything is marked and consistently backed up.
For music, I’ll just go with Musicolet on my phone and Foobar2000 on my computer. There will variations in playlists and content and that’s ok. I’m already figuring out how to do small hacks on both to just get some of the flow I like back.
I am going to miss PLEX Music, that’s for sure.
Sometime this summer I will start building up my own NAS and get it good and beefy and stable early on. At that point I will probably return to building up my music library.
And hey, by this time next year it might be back to as good!
