Hard Disk Backup Utility

Are there any plans in the works for a utility to backup the the EMPEG hard drive(s)? The empeg is in cars that vibrate constantly and take quite a beating. That has got to shorten the life of the harddrive over a computer that doesn't move, so I would assume that at max you are going to get 4-5 years out of the hard drive. Now, what If I was to lose that drive? Well, kiss the music goodbye. I would love to see a utility that would back up the EMPEG Hard drive to another machine.

Are there any plans in the works for a utility to backup the the EMPEG hard drive(s)?

This has been discussed before, but I haven't seen Hugo directly state anything about it recently.

My current work-around is to keep my playlists organized pretty well on my PC hard disk to begin with, then make my Empeg more or less a mirror of the PC hard disk. If I lost the Empeg disk, the only time I'd lose is in making a few extra playlists, but that's not much time.

If there were a way to use the USB port to transfer data bidirectionally, that would be awesome, because then you'd have your backup, and you could also use the Empeg as a multigigabyte file taxi. But I think we reined that idea in as too much feature creep.

The real issue is one that can only be answered by Hugo: the "Empeg as a tool for piracy" one. Hugo, do you have any revelations in that area?


Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

The unit is capable of sending data back to the PC over USB - the point is, we're nervous about doing this due to possible RIAA complaints. At some point we will offer a backup facility which MD5's the tunes and backs up the structure. Then, if you lose it all, you download the structure and can point emplode at your music directories/repeatedly insert CDRs of MP3s and it will re-copy the content.

A direct tar-style backup is another option, but I have more storage in my empeg than in my actual PC...

Hugo

I'm no expert on USB, and I'm still working on finally getting to grips with Linux when I get time at home from work, so there is probably some glaringly obvious reason why this is a 'Really Daft Question', but I am sure I will learn through public humiliation (or at least I think that's the lesson I learned through 7 years of grammar school!)

Could Samba be installed on the empeg to allow Win98/2K or Linux boxes to access the music partition? Or is that more likely to be a feasible option with the Mk.2 with ethernet? Or is it (as I fear) an 'RDQ'? (Really Daft Question, in case anyone forgot)

Like I say, I'm no expert... I only set up Samba on the machine at home about a week or two ago...

Geoff
---- -------
Reg No. 554, s/n 00064 - It's mine I tell you.... all mine :)

click below to see a previous thread on this subject.

http://empeg.comms.net/cgi-bin/showpost.pl?Board=wishlist&Number=696

Hugo,

Now we all know the RIAA are waaaaay tooooo big for their boots etc, but surely
providing a backup facility for the empeg is a legit requirement, if the RIAA wants to get all high and mighty on you, why not ask them what they are doing about the cassete tape / VHS video / minidisc etc etc - nowt !!! ( that leaves them open to a counter claim for descrimination in my book )

To be realistic about it, if you have an mp3 on your empeg from a dubious source then you've already commited the act of piracy backup facility or not !

You'll probably have the file backed up on cd or tape anyway, so allowing ppl to download files to/from the empeg isn't really going to encourage piracy as to get it on the empeg in the first place you'll aready have done the deed !

I'm sure you don't want the hassle / don't have the budget to get into major
legal battles with the RIAA but am sure you'll have the support from every empeg
owner in this matter - so how about it "empegers" how about a show of hands ???

Well that's got that off my chest !

Deejay

I see what you're saying, and I agree. Your point is: Even if the Empeg had bidirectional USB file transfers, it would be no more a tool for piracy than any other high-capacity removable-media drive. In fact, Zip drives, Jaz drives, and CD-Rs would still be easier to use for that purpose. So technically, being able to back up your Empeg's contents has nothing to do with piracy.

But Empeg's concern isn't really with the technical aspects of it. Their concern is that they don't want to attract undue attention from the RIAA. I understand that. It sucks that they have to worry about it at all, but they're already busy enough trying to ship a great product-- getting bogged down with a lawsuit isn't something they need to waste time on right now.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

Yes - the empeg doesn't figure in the piracy issue at all, that has already occured b4 it has got to the empeg.

I don't see that just because the empeg only offers 1 way transfer that it would
stop ppl from grabbing mp3's from the net and uploading them - they would surely
just store a backup copy of them on some other media HDD/CD/Zip/Jazz etc.

Perhaps the empeg team should confront the RIAA with a proposal and see what kicks off ??

I expect they'll reply with the usual piracy waffle - which as I said in my previous post would surely be a case for descrimination as the RIAA aren't doing
a great deal about other very well established devices and am sure that if it were SONY etc they were dealing with their attitude would indeed be different.

So how about it EMPEG - lets march right in to the RIAA through the front door
and lay it down in front of them - what do we want BACKUP ! when do we want it NOW !!!!

Well that's enough ranting for one day !

DJ

Sure if you are willing to pay for all the lawyers and court expenses, DJ.

Term

Yes - the empeg doesn't figure in the piracy issue at all, that has already occured b4 it has got to the empeg.

You seem to be implying that everything that's uploaded onto an Empeg is pirated. Careful how you choose your words.

My purpose for owning an Empeg is to have my entire CD collection in my car at once-- not to play downloaded files.

Perhaps the empeg team should confront the RIAA with a proposal and see what kicks off ??

I'm guessing that would be a waste of time. I don't think the RIAA has any power to either grant or deny Empeg the right to do anything. If I understand correctly, the RIAA is just an advocacy group that represents its member companies. If that's true, then only power they can wield is when they represent a company in a lawsuit. If you went to them in advance and asked them "is it OK to do this?", even if they could respond, their response wouldn't mean anything. They can change their mind as to whether or not it's OK, and sue you later for something that you thought was OK today.

Does anyone have any more information on exactly what the RIAA can and cannot do?

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

Well, I just went to answer my own question, by checking out what the RIAA had to say on their web site.

Looking at their propaganda makes me laugh.

The RIAA, in and of themselves, has no actual power. As I suspected, they work as representatives of the record companies who are members of their association. They influence the music business in several ways:

1) Proposing standards for publication, distribution, and copy protection.
2) Lobbying with US legislators to get laws introduced which protect the interests of their member companies.
3) Representing their member companies in lawsuits to enforce the laws created by #2, above.
4) Working with law enforcement officers to coordinate raids on pirates.

Now, if you look at these closely, you'll see why I say they have no real power. #1 is only useful to companies that participate in their standards. They can't touch MP3 because it doesn't follow any standards they've set. #2 is still protected by the US voter. They can only introduce the legislation- it takes actual lawmakers and voters to turn the bills into laws. #3 should just be a case of enforcement, but they've occasionally used it to throw their weight around without actually being able to affect anything (such as the failed attempt to stop the production of the Rio). And #4 is just finger-pointing an whistle-blowing. They don't have the power to arrest a pirate-- It still takes law enforcement officers to do that, and that, in turn, requires that someone break the law first.

When reading through the stuff at their web site, you realize it's full of scary language designed to make you think that they have a lot of control. But the truth is that they can't do anything about MP3 hardware or the MP3 format, because those things are not controlled by companies which are members of their organization. The only thing they can do is to try to stop illegal distribution of MP3 recordings by their member artists, as in this suit. But even then, when you read that page, you see it's full of doublespeak and half-truths. They tried to put in a section about the artists denouncing the Napster site, and could only get an actual direct quote from one artist. Even the "puffy" artist quote is taken out of context and is not a direct reference to Napster.

Personally, I don't see how the RIAA could have anything at all to say about bidirectional transfers on the Empeg. That's a hardware issue, and as the Rio thing proved, they don't have anything to say about that. The Rio issue was overturned because it's not a digital audio recording device. Neither is the Empeg.

Hugo... your thoughts?

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

I seem to remember that the Rio case was overturned because:

a - It didn't record
and:
b - It wasn't capable of digital output, hence SCMS wasn't applicable

Problem is, copying data out of the unit digitally might verge on what someone would call digitial output. Yes, the Rio can do this with 3rd party software, but not with the stuff shipped with it: and it's this way with the empeg too. The protocol supports reading of files (at some point we intend to add a "play on PC" option beside the "play on empeg" one, which streams the data over USB to the PC where it gets played) and so when the specs of the protocol are released someone could write their own backup program.

We'll release the specs/source of the protocol when we have some time - however, at the moment we're all very busy with both the mk2 and other projects which are all due to see the light of day in the near future :)

Hugo

Interesting. So what you're saying is that if you added bidirectional capability to the Empeg, you'd be getting rid of the one loophole that saved the Rio in the first place. Good point.

Still, it makes the legal mumbo-jumbo sound even more silly when taken in that context. If you extrapolate that far enough, you could easily consider a zip drive or even a floppy diskette a potential piracy tool that requires an SCMS implementation. I can see it now: "RIAA sues Toshiba"...

Sigh. I guess it's not easy trying to balance on the bleeding edge of new technologies.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

No No No & once again No !

I am not implying that all uploaded files are pirated at all !

I just wanted to point out that the act of piracy would be commited b4
the file was uploaded to the empeg ( i am of course referring to a theoretical
file here !! ) and that by providing a means of 2 way transfer wouldn't really affect the act of piracy as you don't need an empeg at all to do it !!

if the RIAA or any other body want to take the issue further then just look at all the other devices on the market that allow 2way transfer / recording
1) your PC - now are they really going to take every PC owener manafacturer etc
and so on etc etc.

I understand that empeg are too busy to take this on at the moment and probably don't have the resource to deal with resultant legal battles - but merely wanted to make the point that we all shouldn't be blinkered when it comes to the RIAA, as we all know they are the antichrist and only take on the small guys who can't afford to stand up to them !

Once again I'll quote the VHS / compact cassette example : why aren't they doing anything about these guys - it's simple the people they represent actually invented the damn things and are getting bucketloads of revenue from them !!

Looking into the future - Philips should be bringing it's DVD recordable gizmo to market later this year - haven't heard the RIAA bitchin about this one too much either, funny that !

so to round it all off : if I had the beans I'd gladly help empeg with the legal fees to facilitate the legit requirement of some kind of useful backup, and in case you haven't already guessed it the RIAA aren't on my xmas card list !!

I'm sure the empeg team will find a viable alternative that will keep us all happy - they always seem to.

DJ

Looking into the future - Philips should be bringing it's DVD recordable gizmo to market later this year - haven't heard the RIAA bitchin about this one too much either, funny that !

Well, the RIAA are complaining about music piracy in all forms, not just on the internet. Their current focus is the internet because it's so rampant there.

As far as DVD and VHS piracy is concerned, it's not their field. They don't represent any movie companies, just record companies. So you shouldn't see them complaining about VCR or DVD recorders. (Discounting for a moment that both the DVD and VHS formats have the capability of recording extremely high quality music into their audio tracks.)

Oh, and the Philips DVD recorder, as I understand it, currently has no digital input capability, precisely because of these unresolved piracy issues.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

So what about a backup mechanism that tar'd the whole file system to a piped zip with encryption on (or better yet pgp) out to the USB port where it is saved on a PC. It could probably be broken (what isn't being cracked these days) but it would show a reasonable effort to minimize piracy in a court battle.

If you extrapolate that far enough, you could easily consider a zip drive or even a floppy diskette a potential piracy tool that requires an SCMS implementation. I can see it now: "RIAA sues Toshiba"...

I think you underestimate the RIAA, Tony. In articles I have read on wired.com, RIAA has held the explicit position that recording a song from CD onto your hard drive in MP3 format is a violation of copyright law and act of piracy. RIAA says that they simply have not chosen to prosecute such acts at this time.

Corby
SN#320, 6-Gig Blue

In articles I have read on wired.com, RIAA has held the explicit position that recording a song from CD onto your hard drive in MP3 format is a violation
of copyright law and act of piracy. RIAA says that they simply have not chosen to prosecute such acts at this time.

Er... what about people who take songs from their CDs and dub them onto tapes? Are they committing acts of piracy as well? I was under the impression that when you purchase a CD you have purchased the rights to that ONE INDIVIDUAL CD and the music it contains (I read this up on the MP3.COM/RIAA lawsuit regarding the "My MP3" service). So technically if you have rights to that one CD, you should be able to record MP3's of that music all day long as long as they are for personal use and are not distributed in any fashion.

Am I incorrect here?

(O|||||O)

I'm staying away from the whole legal issues being discussed here. Personally, I will continue to buy CD's, use a DA extractor on the CD, then an MP3 compressor on my music even if the RIAA starts cracking down. I don't forsee them hunting down everyone with an MP3 encoder.

Anyhow, I really can't see that many people finding the entire unit backup function useful. Even only with a 6gb disk in mine, the backup image would eat half of my storage on my system. Even going to the largest hard drive for my system (18GB) I would still loose 33% to a backup. And I do have 22 gigs of total space in a linux server, but space there is limited as well, and 6gb disapperaring there is not a thing I need. Trying to keep that backup secure, but easially updatable is going to be hard, and time consuming when updating it.

I definitly want some sort of "easy restore" option for the empeg. And having the empeg somehow find the music it once had would be nice. A "backup" could then fill a meg or so at most, and be easy to manage. To restore in the unlikely event my unit suffers some sort of failure, I can deal with feeding my system my MP3 CD's again. The main thing I worry about now is not losing the music, but losing the tag changes on the unit.

And this brings up a good point, keep your MP3's on CD or other removable media after creation. These discs will have many uses, including the ability to easially restore your music collection to a brand new MKII unit. CD-R drives are as cheap as ever, and much more reliable then before.

My empeg site is:http://24.236.3.131/empeg/

The main thing I worry about now is not losing the music, but losing the tag changes on the unit

Drakina, you're perfectly right: we already have reliable back-ups for the MP3's: the CD's where they came from. Restoring of the MP3s is not difficult - it'll only take (a llllllooooonnnnngggg) time and it is, except for disk shuffle mostly automatic. The real damage is in the playlist structure and the tags

Any chance, Hugo/Mike that you can support an export (import) of the full playlist structure that does not copy the MP3 itself but does extract (insert) the MP3 tags??

Henno
# 00120 (6GB+18)

...or tape, for us cheapskates who stay behind the curve. I picked up a cheap SCSI Exabyte 9mm drive (CHEEEAAAPP), updated the firmware, and now back up my RIPs onto tape @ next to no cost having discovered a bargin bin here full of 112m 9mm tapes....

..not the version I've seen, then!

You can already export this in CSV form - there's no import option, but you can get the structure *out* of emplode :)

Hugo

Er... what about people who take songs from their CDs and dub them onto tapes? Are they committing acts of piracy as well?

This is an interesting point of legality. If the RIAA had their way, they'd make that illegal, too. As I recall, they even tried, once upon a time. They can't, though, because we won't let them. Like I said, the RIAA can't make the laws, they can only propose them. It's up to the voters to pass the laws.

Does anyone have more details on exactly which law it is that allows home users to make their own copies of movies and music? It's a specific law, I just don't remember its name or when it was passed. It's that very law that allows the VCR and audio cassette markets to flourish.

In articles I have read on wired.com, RIAA has held the explicit position that recording a song from CD onto your hard drive in MP3 format is a violation of copyright law and act of piracy. RIAA says that they simply have not chosen to prosecute such acts at this time.

Again, the RIAA is trying to throw their weight around, and bullying companies into submission. There's no way that making an MP3 of your own CD can be illegal in any way. The RIAA has no legal leg to stand on there. If the RIAA is saying "it's illegal, but we're just choosing not to prosecute", they're just bullshitting and trying to scare us. Making an MP3 is just like dubbing a tape, or burning a duplicate (or a mix) CD. The law is not broken until you give that copy to someone else.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

Making an MP3 is just like dubbing a tape, or burning a duplicate (or a mix) CD. The law is not broken until you give that copy to someone else.

---

I think everyone's ignoring one little detail: with tapes, vhs copies, etc, you LOSE quality. With 256kbit mp3's on the otherhand, you have a nearly identical digital copy.
-mark

...proud to have one of the first Mark I units

Technically an mp3 is not an exact digital copy, so legally how can they claim it is..
(sure it 'sounds' similar, but it isn't exactly the same.. =)

Jazz
(List 112, S/N 00030, 4 gig blue)

You can already export this in CSV form - there's no import option, but you can get the structure *out* of emplode

I know. As matter of fact, I'm using the emplode CSV file as a catalogue for my CD collection by sorting the export by artist / album and deleting unnecessary columns as well as all details rows (in Excel). The info is there, but typing it all back in again will be a nightmare.

Adding tag info extracted from the MP3s to the CSV file (or whatever other format) will bring a back-up facility wihin reach, while staying out of the copyright issue. As matter of fact it will only work if the source disks are still available.

You'd only have to build an import utility that can associate the lowest level entries with the MP3 files (and picking up the tag info, and etc. . . .)

Promise to put it on your investigate list (together with a 'never shuffle' option) ?


Henno
# 00120 (6GB+18)

Does anyone have more details on exactly which law it is that allows home users to make their own copies of movies and music? It's a specific law, I just don't remember its name or when it was passed. It's that very law that allows the VCR and audio cassette markets to flourish.

You might be thinking of the U.S. Audio Home Recording Act; there was an interesting thread about it on Slashdot recently.

-v

Thanks for that link. This is very interesting. According to this page by the RIAA, the Audio Home Recording Act specifies what media types are permitted for home copying, and that non-SCMS digital copying methods are illegal. But when I read this summary of the AHRA, it only seems to specify which medias must implement SCMS, not which medias where copying is allowed. In fact, according to that AHRA summary, it seems that personal-use consumer copying is directly and explicitly protected by the act, regardless of the media.

I wonder which is the correct interpretation? Maybe one day I'll actually learn how to speak Arcturian, so I can read the text of the AHRA and come to a conclusion myself.

All in all, it seems to me that the AHRA didn't adequately predict the ability of personal computers to dupe audio CDs, and now we're in a legal gray area that will need to be resolved with proper addendums to the AHRA which clarify it.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

In reply to:

---

Technically an mp3 is not an exact digital copy, so legally how can they claim it is..

---

But once you have that mp3 you can make further exact copies of it unlike an analog media.

Brian

I wonder which is the correct interpretation?

and this is just the US situation. I remember that under German law, for instance, copying for private, non-commercial use is allowed. One hi-fi magazine even quoted that 'copies given to a friend' were legal there.

In my home country (Netherlands - Holland as some of you would say) a levy on CD-R's was introduced to cover royalty payments for any music copied. So even the disks I use for backing-up computer data, support Lionel Ritchie's family of ex-spouses. I just hope the RIAA isn't going to tax Emma, or Emplode sessions. Think of their increased revenue when they bribe Mike to keep a few bugs in emplode, so we'll again need 10 sessions to copy a single CD across to Emma .

BTW: Emplode data transfer is stable now, also under USB

Henno
# 00120 (6GB+18)

So even the disks I use for backing-up computer data, support Lionel Ritchie's family of ex-spouses.

(Sound of Tony rolling on floor laughing his ass off)

All joking aside, that's the case in the U.S., as well. The AHRA implemented per-unit levies on recording hardware. I dunno, it all sounds like a Mafia protection racket to me.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144

Okay, I was just thinking... What if you put the secondary drive in the machine (larger than the first one), and do a disk to disk copy of all the mp3's? I know that this isn't backup, but if you are afraid of losing your data, and nobody will issue a utility to back it up, then why not buy a new, bigger drive and copy the contents to that. Or even GHOST the data to the drive, and then the EMPEG will work with the bigger drive and not even know that it was changed?

Will that work? Hugo?

Or even GHOST the data to the drive, and then the EMPEG will work with the bigger drive and not even know that it was changed?

Yes and no.

Plugging your hard disk into a PC and using ghost could cause problems. Current PCs are the latest in a long chain of kludges and therefore do wierd things. If you start with a blank drive on your PC it will probably treat it as LBA so that it will work with steam driven software. This means that the CHS (cylinders, heads and sectors) is rearranged to ensure that DOS programs can access as much of the disk as possible. This is usually a good idea. Unfortunately though the original empeg disk images were created on Linux boxes which didn't need to do this and used sensible values for the CHS. This wouldn't be important apart from the fact that this affects the partition table and every release since beta8b has actually written the partition table in order to create a new swap partition.

If you are a Linux guru then you could probably successfully create a partition table compatible with the empeg upgrade process but under DOS it would certainly be a challenge.

In summary - don't use Ghost. Using the unit itself to do the backup should work very well though.

HTH

--
Mike Crowe
I may not be speaking on behalf of empeg above :-)

I do what Tony does -- keep a mirror on my PC. It's fine for now...

I agree with Hugo that the RIAA is a HUGE issue which warrants much caution; money tends to win legal battles and the RIAA has a ton of it. Drawn out legal battles tend to tank small companies and good ideas ...

Some call that Darwinism; I call it American lunacy. (And I'm a Yank who grew up with that crap. Bleah.)

-- Bleys

"If you would judge, understand." -- Seneca