Hi everyone. 

I was wondering if anyone bothers with backing up their BM5.  I use mine only for playing music (no photos) and know that I have all the music already on my PC (and original CDs) but having spent quite a bit of time copying folder art to the individual albums' folders in the BM5 I would not want to have to go through the process again. 

Has anyone plugged in an external hard drive to simply copy the Music folder and if so, is it right that I would need to start it up in setup/admin menu first to get the XP desktop. Maybe no one's backed up the BM5 like this before but I would be very interested to hear any thoughts. 

Many thanks

Andrew

I don't have a BM5 so might be talking out of my ar$e, but isn't the complete Music folder directly visible to your PC through the network? Then just plug the external drive to your PC and copy the folder over there. Granted it will take much longer over the network, but you don't have to stay around and watch the progress...

It is a bit silly to copy the music files if you have them elsewhere at least once already, but as you say, manual copying and rearranging is a lot of work, and hard drives are cheap as peanuts nowadays.

I Think that it's rather easy if your a bit familiar with windows XP.

The fastest way is to enter the service menu which actually is just the Windows XP desktop.

Then mount a USB drive at one free slot at the back and copy your shared music folder, which probably is located in a data partition on the drive.

This way the data doesn't has to travel along the network.

@ Tournedos: I think/know  have the solution for you to get your BM1 visible in linkrooms..if your still looking

Beobuddy:

@ Tournedos: I think/know  have the solution for you to get your BM1 visible in linkrooms..if your still looking

I don't have a BM1 either - you must be confusing me with somebody else

Thanks both for your quick answers. Beobuddy, I agree, I prefer the option of not having to copy 100GB across my wireless network.  Knowing that PC hard discs can fail, has anyone considered whether it's worth backing up the disc as an image in case there is a disc failure, or would you leave this up to your dealer to have fixed?

I'm done ripping all my CDs in WMA losless and I have a backup of it on an external Harddisk!

You can copy all your files via Service-Menu (= Windows XP embedded desktop) from and to the Beomaster 5. But this is NOT the official way! :-)

For the future: I think if you're serious about this, we should get 2 things of the Beomaster 5:

1.) a compatible (same connection and bus-standard as the current) harddrive for the Beomaster 5 computer side. Or perhaps a 500GB SSD

2.) a spare motherboard used inside the Beomaster 5

As we all know: Computers are aged when you're walking out of the shop with them :-) So if Bang & Olufsen didn't buy enough spare motherboards there will not be any spare parts for a Beomaster 5 after 1 or 2 years... ;-)

I've made a backup from my BM1 and replaced the disk with a larger one.

So making an image is possible with the BM1, but you'll have to be carefull with the original one if you're placing it in a other system.

Mounted and hidden folders/partitions are placed on the disk.

I even saw that the serialnumber of the BM/S 5 are programmed on both the disk and the BIOS. So if just cloning of the disk works, I don't know jet.

Just have to try.

But if you once in a while copy your music to an external disk will be enough. If then the disk fails, then it will (probably) be quarantee.

@ Tournedos, Sorry I thought it was you who had problems with linking the BM1.

For Mac users who were some of the earlier users of the BeoSound 5, there might be certain complications. An earlier vision of the BeoConnect software for the Mac transferred the files from the Mac to the BM5 by dumping all song files into one folder. A later update to BeoConnect now organizes the transferred files into Artist and Album folders. However, the problem with files transferred before this update is that having so many files in one single folder can cause problems copying to an external hard drive. If that is the case, you might need to create 2 or more folders on the external hard drive and divide the copies files among these separate folders.

Or re-transfer you music using the new version of BeoConnect.  This is what I did.  Deleted the mac music from the BS5, then copied it again using the new version of BeoConnect.  Yes, it took a day or so, and another day or so for MOTS to catch up (but the computers were doing the work, not me... I just had to peek at it once in a while to make sure it was still working).  It also allowed me to use the folder.jpg method for cover art vs. individually adding the better coverart to each and every file.  Long term, this seemed like a small price to pay.

Stan

Sadly, before the update for BeoConnect came out, I had already spent COUNTLESS hours replacing the cover art and cleaning up the tags on every single album from within BeoPlayer. Not something I ever want to do again!

For anyone considering purchasing a BeoSound 5, my advise is to spend time cleaning up tags and replacing cover art before the BeoSound 5 arrives.