[cadman50]

My HD is about 75-85% full. I want to back it up to a flash drive. However, once I start I wonder if there are options to pause like you get when storing a CD and you have to leave the car before it's finished. The manual doesn't say anything about the actual operation except to say that I should be on a long drive when I back up the contents. It takes apprx 10 minutes to store a CD (on average), it might take about half that to write each CD to the flash drive. If I have over 200 CD's stored, that's 200 x 5 minutes = 1000 minutes (16-17 hours). Whose done it?

[April1]

Are you sure you can store contents of 200 music CDs on HD? I think you can do only one tenth of it, I have 2011 F25.

[cadman50]

Originally Posted by April1

Are you sure you can store contents of 200 music CDs on HD? I think you can do only one tenth of it, I have 2011 F25.

I already have 190 music CD's stored. And I'll be over 200 soon. The last time I checked I had about 3G left. Not sure what it is now. I was thinking about my calculation about how long it should take. Maybe realistically it takes 3 minutes to store one cd. Then it would be like 600 minutes or 10 hours. Still that seems like a long time to download roughly 10G of data. If it was 2 minutes then it would be over 6 hours. Since no one has even responded then I'll probably just stick a USB drive into the socket and try it. Seems like most people just use USB flash drives instead of storing to the HD. I just didn't have the time to sit in front of my computer and rip CD's. it was easier on my way to work to take them every day for a while and rip them to the HD.

[JSY]

My experience using the USB flash drive to transfer music to the HD... The car MUST be on during the duration of the transfer. If you turn your car off at any point, the transfer will stop. (Off as in everything off, not just stopping the engine.) You will not be able to "continue" - you'll have a partial transfer and have to start all over again.

I have to imagine going the other way around will be the same.

I also have about 12% free - about 1300 songs - all around 192k-320k sampling rate - and the transfer from USB to HD takes about 45 minutes. I know because I do it a lot unfortunately because I am always adding stuff to my HD and I don't want to have multiple folders for each time I upload from a USB.

What I do is I rip everything at my home computer to my USB stick and that is my basis for the HD. Then I transfer to the HD. Everytime I make a change to the stick, I delete my car HD collection and reupload.

The car isn't smart enough to only upload what is new. Grrr...

Hope this helps.

[kmarei]

A good tip when you are always adding stuff is to put the new songs on the root of a flash drive
So they are not inside any folders
And when you are done importing then, rename USB1 to any name you want

I did that
Not I have a folder called Whitney Houston with all her songs inside it
Another with Dire straits etc

[cadman50]

Originally Posted by JSY

My experience using the USB flash drive to transfer music to the HD... The car MUST be on during the duration of the transfer. If you turn your car off at any point, the transfer will stop. (Off as in everything off, not just stopping the engine.) You will not be able to "continue" - you'll have a partial transfer and have to start all over again.

I have to imagine going the other way around will be the same.

I also have about 12% free - about 1300 songs - all around 192k-320k sampling rate - and the transfer from USB to HD takes about 45 minutes. I know because I do it a lot unfortunately because I am always adding stuff to my HD and I don't want to have multiple folders for each time I upload from a USB.

What I do is I rip everything at my home computer to my USB stick and that is my basis for the HD. Then I transfer to the HD. Everytime I make a change to the stick, I delete my car HD collection and reupload.

The car isn't smart enough to only upload what is new. Grrr...

Hope this helps.

Thanks JSY. That does help. I'm approaching the end of my CD's and now have just less than 10% free. I would think it would be equal timewise to go from HD to USB so with that said, I'll plan on doing my backup on a trip longer than an hour. That seems like it should do it. I plan on using another USB stick in the center console for alot of other music as well. Between that, music on the HD, XM, FM HD, and Pandora/MOG (in the future) I think I'll have enough choices. One oddity though....sometimes when I switch from radio to CD/multimedia on either the controls next to the iDrive or just using the back button, the "cursor" goes deep into the albums stored on the HD (always the same one). It looks like it's the 100th CD. So I have to scroll all the way back to the top to do a search or select current playback. Very strange. Have you seen this on yours at all?