Current Storage Advice?

[Daniel W.]

Right now, my storage is scattered across 6 hard drives of varying size and an ongoing Backblaze upload (20k + files to go), and I'll be leaving home for college soon. I'm not wanting to spend more money on drives, but I still want to keep things reasonably redundant and secure, but cost effective (due to the $ buying of books, supplies, and crud.)

Here's where I stand as of right now:

1. 1TB drive with up to date and all images ever shot, and video files. 80% Full
2. 1TB Drive of non-automated backups data (copied folders), secondary backup of images ever98% Full
3. 500GB Drive of non-current images (up to about March 09) and non-automated backup data (also March 09) (full)
4. 320GB which is the time machine for my current Macbook "Eugene III", 95% full
5. 320GB Time Machine of my Mac Mini, no longer in use (full)
6. 320GB Time Machine of my old macbook (no longer in use), "Eugene II" (full)

My thought is to just "freeze" everything as is and set the hard drives on a special side of my desk. I'll turn them on and run them when I'm home (December and June), but for the most part a permanent archive as "before college" and when larger storage becomes cheaper / I have $ and allows me to consolidate the smaller 320's and 500 to a pair of (mirrored) 1TB's, and upgrade as time progresses. In the end I'd like to be able to stick the contents of everything onto a large drive of "Before College" work.

Then, for college I'll purchase one 1TB for the "new" time machine and a 500GB for consolidated image storage. I'll have a 500GB USB drive for "mobile storage" but since it's always going to be moving, I wouldn't trust it for anything longer than two months.

Thoughts? Suggestions? I'm all ears.

[Kalrog]

If you are talking about having multiple copies of things and having to buy multiple external drives to support it as is... have you thought about going with one of the RAID solutions? Either NAS or USB/FireWire attached storage? The enclosures are a bit more expensive of an initial investment, but then you just fill it with whatever HDs you want to meet your storage needs. And you can upgrade it with just the addition of a new HD instead of buying a new external one with redundancy.

Drobo is a good name, but there are many others out there depending on how technical you are and how much you want to control the striping. I went with a D-Link model, but there are many others. I really think this is a better solution for you as you get increased storage and redundant storage all in a single box.

[Daniel W.]

I considered drobo briefly but I'm a bit confused by it.

Is it, one master drive with a series of identical drives and the size of the master drive is the size of space, or do the collection of drives form one large storage device (so if my drobo has 4 1TB drives, do I have 4TB to work with, or just 1?)

[GypsyHighSide]

Storage right now has never been cheaper. You can get 1TB drives all day long for under $60 and 2TB for under $110. I don't have a Drobo, but from what I understand, your usable space would be slightly under the total drive capacity. It is supposed to be a pretty easy setup. Fill the drive bays with say 4 each 1TB drives. If one of the drives gets close to capacity an indicator light shows on the front of the unit. Just pop that drive out and slide in a larger drive. It does its magic and your new drive it incorporated in the array.

[Kalrog]

Originally Posted by Daniel W.

I considered drobo briefly but I'm a bit confused by it.

I decided against the Drobo mainly because it is a non standard RAID thing and that makes it a bit less... uh... standard. As in if something goes wrong I am stuck with Drobo. But from what I hear it is a good product.

All of these devices use some variation of RAID. In RAID, you have a bunch of different ways that you can configure things to trade performance for capacity for redundancy. I'm going to geek out for a bit here - I hope you can follow.

RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives (or disks or whatever)

Redundant means that all of the data exists on more than 1 drive. So if you lose one drive, you don't actually lose any data. But this holds true in different ways.

RAID 0 - not really RAID as there is no redundancy. But you get the best performance and the most space. If you have 4x1TB drives, you get 4TB of usable space.
RAID 1 - full drives are copied. So if you have 4 drives, you would have 2 drives with data and 2 drives that are exact copies of those other 2 drives. Total of 2TB of data.
RAID 5 - Pars of all drives hold new data and parts of all drives hold data that is on other drives. The formula for space is N-1 (where N is the number of drives). So you would have 3 TB of space available here. This is widely considered the best compromise of space/redundancy/performance.

Then you have a few other options (like combining different RAID levels - a la RAID 10). And you can do hot spares. And you then have JBOD which gets you space similar to RAID 0 with no redundancy, but the data isn't stripped in the same way.

I hope that helps.

[SCone]

Drobo offers some advantages over a traditional RAID setup... the good is it configures itself... allows various sized drives... but it still works best with identical drives installed... their website allows you to configure a unit with the drives you want & it will show you all the info about capacity

[Wil_Bloodworth]

One thing to consider is that backups in the same household are still susceptible to fire. Unless you're backing up on a bi-weekly basis and storing the backup drive in a fire safe... you could potentially lose everything.

Same situation with house burglary.

I'm also in the same boat... maybe I should listen to my own advice!

- Wil

[dryicerx]

Originally Posted by Kalrog

RAID 0 - not really RAID as there is no redundancy. But you get the best performance and the most space. If you have 4x1TB drives, you get 4TB of usable space.

Just a note about Raid0, don't do this unless you're feeling suicidal. If any one drive fails, the entire array's data is lost.

RAID5 offers to best trade off of safety vs. performance. You can have up to one drive failure and still have no data loss within the array.

[swanny338]

All my stuff is Raid 0 because of HD Video... I get way more performance out of Raid 0. Of course, I have 3 backups of my drives.

[iCe]

I thought this thread was going to be about batteries.

I use 3 1Tb drives and keep a copy on each drive. My Drobo died again but I'm thinking about replacing it. It was a nice convenient way to back up. Time Machine (Mac) sucks so I'm thinking about giving Chronosynch a try. I only want to back up my RAW files and I think that Chronosynch and a few Tb's of drive space will do the trick for now.

[Zack Davis]

Drobo is just overpriced, $1200 for a NAS is just nuts. Personally I'm looking really closely at the QNAP TS-419P not only is it $600, you can select from different types of raid, it's a print server, streaming web server (so you can access the content on the drives via your smart phone) and it has A LOT more ports than any of the Drobo's.

QNAP Systems, Inc. ( TS-419P Turbo NAS ) - Quality Network Appliance Provider

Amazon.com: QNAP 4-Bay Desktop Network Attached Storage TS-419P: Electronics

[RKEnnis]

I don't have anything to add about storage solutions beyond what has already been mentioned.

But regarding the Time Machine backup disks you mention. I assume you'll be wanting to copy the contents of those drives to your new backup solution? If so, remember that Time Machine stores a history of changes to the backup. So unless you really need that entire history, you could save yourself some space by keeping only the latest version of the files. Also, by default Time Machine backs up the OS and application files. You may not need to keep those files from machines on longer in use.

[iCe]

Originally Posted by Zack Davis

Drobo is just overpriced, $1200 for a NAS is just nuts. Personally I'm looking really closely at the QNAP TS-419P not only is it $600, you can select from different types of raid, it's a print server, streaming web server (so you can access the content on the drives via your smart phone) and it has A LOT more ports than any of the Drobo's.

QNAP Systems, Inc. ( TS-419P Turbo NAS ) - Quality Network Appliance Provider

Amazon.com: QNAP 4-Bay Desktop Network Attached Storage TS-419P: Electronics

No argument there. Considering all the trouble I've had with mine (not the $1200 version) I have been hesitant to replace it. I'll have to scope out your links...

[Daniel W.]

Other than being able to remote-access a drive, what is the advantage for NAS? I'm the only one accessing the data (so no need for multi-user) and I'd prefer to keep the "archives" as far from the "net" as possible. That may make me a mild conspiracy theorist but I know "they" are out "there."

Not going to even think about fires to jinx it. Nope. Knock on wood, salt over shoulder. I wish I could leave the drives on to Backblaze up, but the fact that they'd be on 24/7 for about six months for the upload... Eek. I wish I could just ship them the drive (a copy of it, not the only original) to be added to my account...

Right now, I think the best plan of action is to go Drobo (or if anyone can suggest something cheaper but simple and reliable for Mac) with 4x 1TB drives, I'll of-load the series of "historical" time machines and whatever I have right now across the small collection of drives onto it. This way, it's on a "redundant" system that can heal itself (as I read it?) and will allow me to add larger drives as price comes down, without having to physically shuffle the data around each time I pop in an upgrade. In addition, I already have an external drive I can take with me to NY (RIT) for the Time Machine and image backup instead of adding to the pile.

FYI, here's what I'm working with now. I find it ironic that they're surrounded by neg sheets and polaroid negatives waiting to be cleared and fixed. Prints and negs... sleeve, binder, and into a vault safe and they're fine for years... data...UGH.:

[Kalrog]

Well, a NAS is really not any more open than an attached storage option, so that isn't something to worry about.

I would say that drive number and RAID preference are most important if you are a single user. But keep in mind that a NAS on a gigabit network has a very fast transfer rate - faster than USB 2.0, but not up to USB 3.0 or FireWire. Because of the CPU overhead on a USB device, I would lean towards either FireWire or network, but either works fine.

Something that might be helpful... many NAS devices come with a built in printer port if you want to use it as a print server as well and not attach stuff to your computer.