Google Music lets you backup your entire library

One of the only disadvantages of Google’s new Google Music service is that, until now, your music has essentially been locked within the cloud — with the exception of any tracks you purchased through the Android Market.

Today, however, Google has rolled out a new version of its Google Music Manager that gives its U.S. users the ability to download a backup of all the songs stored within the service. The feature addition will probably be most useful for people who experience a computer crash or external physical storage drive failure, which virtually eliminates all the personal files they may have saved. Basically, using Google Music now means you never have to worry about losing your entire collection.

The music collection backup doesn’t solve some of the other problems people have with using a cloud-based service to manage their music. If you’ve always got a reliable internet connection and primarily use mobile devices that run Google’s Android operating system, then Google Music doesn’t have many setbacks. But if you’re an iPhone/iPod owner who primarily likes to listen to your music collection in a gym that gets a really bad cell phone reception, cloud-based music services aren’t very appealing.

Google has also added a feature that lets you more easily share YouTube music videos of the songs in your library. Google Music already lets people share tracks with their friends via Google+, but this new feature is a nice addition for people who primarily use YouTube for their streaming media consumption.