Let’s start with some ideas and feedback from yesterday, shall we? (Which if you’ve not read, maybe you should first?)
So – The general idea was “You have LOADS of stuff” ..In my case, digital images and you need to store them somewhere! Where? How?
The comments that came back were as follows… (In short)
Carlo is going to have a look at “The Cloud” – The cloud is a big bucket of space in the sky that you pay for and can upload to and download from, different companies, different prices. I am going to try out http://www.livedrive.com/ after they contacted me via twitter and told me about their free trial. I have signed up and am currently sending my D: drive to “outer space” – All 65gb of it, mostly rubbish, just to test.
Andras (Howdy!) was also interested in the “Online” version of things – I have started my LiveDrive trial as above and am also in touch with another company to try their offering.
Jools is hightek! Raids, Servers and lots of backing up between boxes – Not a bad idea, and, if you’re tech savvy – great! Also, you’ll need a bit of space for servers (just like a pc, but usually a bit gutsier and with larger disk space options.)
Rob is all about the second gen Drobo – A lovely device but potentially very expensive (isn’t everything?) and with multiple reports of failure – I will stay clear of that one for now.
Western Digital 1.5 TB Caviar Green
Jason is more in line with what I was thinking, disks – multiple, hard, disks… Fill one, duplicate it, put the backup away / post it to your granny, get another disk. Trudi is almost in the same sort of boat – using her Mac to star, sifting through the crap (of which there ain’t much, have you seen this girl’s work!) and then dumping off to external disks..
So, What do we make of all this? Well – if you have a lot of money, you can most likely just say, OK – I’ll have two Drobos and a DroboShare… Or you might start yourself a small server farm, me, I have not much cash but need a solution. What I have chosen to look at is to get a dedicated LOCAL backup drive for images where everything is stored locally on a QUICK FW800 / USB2 drive – External, 1.5TB and then back that up to “The Cloud” via one of the services I plan on using. But it’s going to get tricky… So, that means another diagram!
So then, that’s my plan – Some disks (And I’ll use the G-Tech as I have them already) and an online account (£99.00 unlimited – IF it works out and is good and functional)
Tonight, I start my trial and organise my disks… Tell me, what do you think is the right way to organise my image above (The amazing diagram!) if that is ALL you have… Three drives (Or, let’s call it two x 1.5TB drives and a “Cloud” account?…
Till Tomorrow,
Sime
Flickr CC Images used in this post from here and here – Thanks!
Western Digital 1.5 TB Caviar Green
Looking into Livedrive now, my big thing is I need something that I can use as an archive backup as opposed to a simple backup – I know most of the online storage I’ve looked into delete your file from the “cloud” 30 days after you’ve deleted it from your local computer/external drive/etc.
As far as organizing? Call 1st drive E and 2nd drive F, I’d use E as my working drive, backup to F whenever I made changes to E and let the cloud monitor and backup/store from F.
.-= Jason´s last blog ..Lex Justice & Ras•Pect =-.
It appears they do allow online only copies of files:
Local Caching
Right click any file on your Livedrive and choose whether to keep a local copy or not. Local copies mean faster access to your files but take up space on your computer. Online only copies are slower to access but don’t take up any space on your computer.
Check it.
yo.
checkin now!
.-= disco~stu´s last blog ..LoweproUK Comp Win! =-.
Testing, as requested on twitter
testes testes one two
I may have over-complicated my comment on day one! I used to have a virtual server farm, three machines, but this had other purposes beyond the backups. The main point was my workstation had mirrored drives (raid 1) 4x250Gb = 500Gb space, mirrored. These backed up to the servers, which had 5x250Gb drives = 750Gb space (raid 5) . What this means is your workstation, your macbook, should work off drives that are mirrored, for security, if you can make these an esata connection or work on the internal drive, dumping to the mirrored set-up. Then at regular intervals you back the mirrored contents to the larger disk array of 3+ disks. This is your safer option.
Having looked into Drobo boxes, they appear at great development in direct and psuedo netwok storage. But the reviews do worry me. The tried and trusted route of raid, has it’s limitations but is tried and tested. I am using an Edgestore DAS200 for my mirrored setup and am looking into 4 bay drive enclosures for my ‘archive’ system.
I have effectively pulled all drives from my servers and combined them all onto one server at home. Space is not really an issue as the server also doubles as an HTPC and fits under the TV.
Incidentally I have a ASUS P108b case and two Lian Li super quite server boxes that are tiny. Running swiss fans are almost silent. All sat in storage doing nowt. If you want to test run a server option.
My comment on the ‘cloud’ option sounds good, but commercial NAS solutions rely on the facility for large bandwidth from your base. If I was backing up my office via NAS offsite, I would use my 50Gb capacity three times over each month. Also I used to run an essential back up offsite and it would require to be left running overnight. Really annoying to turn up in the morning to find the connection dropped and it had to be done all over again.
Two enclosures, one 2 bay mirrored and one 4+bay raid 5 is a more than adequate solution until U2 pay you to be tour photographer and you can justify large scale offsite back ups and leave the internal back ups to an assistant
Cialis, Derren Brown, GTVOne, Roger, Roger, Roger.