I Should Have Done This a Long Time Ago

I am approaching my 30s and I have been building my digital music collection ever since middle school. I still have my original music files from all the way back then, and while I hardly listen to the music from my middle school days anymore since my music tastes have changed drastically since then, I still like to go back and listen to them for the nostalgia trip.

I have been fortunate to have never lost any music after the many transfers and copying and pasting of my music from drive to drive, device to device over the nearly 2 decades. However, the fear of my storage drives getting corrupted or lost always sat in the back of my mind, so I decided to to back them up through cloud storage with Dropbox at first, then later on also added it Google Drive. I've had them backed up to the cloud for several years and just adding onto them whenever I purchased new music while only keeping my current library of music on 1 SSD at a time.

However I recently had a scary wakeup call. Out of curiosity, I decided to download my Dropbox library to make sure everything was okay, only to come and find out that ALL of the metadata for ALL of my music was lost. I can still seemingly access and play the music still, but all metadata from the artist names, albums, track numbers, labels, etc, was all gone! The only way to tell which tracks and albums were which was by the file names and album covers, but seemingly even a lot of the album covers were lost as well.

I then went and downloaded my entire library from Google Drive, and unbelievably the same thing happened! How did this happen? I don't know, and it's not consistent either because on Google Drive, it still had some of the album covers that were lost from Dropbox, but was also missing some album covers that my music from Dropbox did have. However, again ALL metadata was missing from the music files.

Sure, I can still listen to the music, but it's still nearly as bad as just losing my music because I wouldn't be able to organize my music library properly, and if I can lose the metadata from cloud storage, who's to say I won't lose my files entirely as well? I lost all trust in cloud storage from there, so I decided to take my backups into my own hands.

I archived all of my music library from my current SSD onto Blu-ray discs and I'm going to store them away in my closet, never to touch them unless I lose my music from my current SSD. I will also create other copies to keep off site in the near future as well.

My music library is the most important possession I have. I also have a high end audio setup, but it would hurt so much more if I lost my music library than if I lost my hifi setup. I don't know how I've gone this far without losing my music, but I'm greatful that I haven't, and this will give me peace of mind that I'll never lose my music library, so I can keep building it it more and more throughout my life. I want to be in my 70s and still be able to listen to the random (honestly trashy) music remixes I found online from when I was 12 years old. xD