External Storage suggestions/Ideas

antc

antc

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Hey All,

I wanted to ask you guys what you all use for external storage for your Macs.

Personally I have a collection of external WD drives but its getting on my nerves as it uses up too many power sockets and obviously, if the drive were to fail I would loose my data.

Currently I have a 2tb drive inside my iMac and 2x2tb external drives connected to it backing up via time machine, to each driver per alternate backup.

My main concerns are around my photos and music. I have 3x copies of my photos, one on the iMac and one on each of the 2x2tb drives.

I have a separate 1tb drive which contains my music. And another separate 1tb drive for my docs etc.

I have a Drobo FS which I no longer use as I don't trust it any longer since I turned it on 6 months ago and all the data I had on it had gone, literally gone, nothing left.

My initial thoughts, although I am at the early stages of planning this, is to perhaps get a Sinology Nas as well as perhaps some form of DAS for super fast quick access. My iMac is a 2010 27inch so doesn't have any TB ports and only usb 2. Although I am planning to get this upgraded next year to a much newer model, perhaps a 5k retina or maybe I may upgrade to an rMBP and have an external screen but thats a whole other conversation.

Would love to hear how you guys manage such things and what you would advise.
 
I'd go with your initial thought. Synology are well regarded for NAS solutions.

Not sure I'd bother with the DAS for fast access as, if I read it correctly, this is for backup more than stuff your working on. Set it to backup nightly and your done. Although you would only have 2 copies at that point. You could always attach one of your current WD drives to the NAS and back the NAS up to the external drive too, alternate your 2 WD drives and keep one offsite and you'd be sorted.
 
If you have files stored on an external drive then you are going to need another drive as a backup, or backup to a cloud storage system. Now I have a similar set-up to you and it can get to look like spaghetti at the back of the mac if you are not careful. I have the external drives power coming from a multi-way and the cable , for the most part hidden inside some plastic tubing . This makes things much neater. I did look into cloud storage, which isn't too bad if you have a fast internet connection. However they all seem to need to connect to the Mac hard drive and won't link to external drives. Which is no good if you external drives. Looked at NAS a while ago, but I think USB3 is faster if you need speed. Not sure that I need to use Thunderbolt at the moment as USB 3 is fast enough as the external HD's are the limiting factor . Thunderbolt you really need SSD's to get the best results
 
Synology all the way, and if you want extra speed then fill it with SSD's :)
 
Thanks all, been having a little more of a look around. Come across the WD My Book Duo's. Seem like a good idea to me to have this perhaps as direct attached storage, say to store my photos and iTunes library, setup as Raid 1, then have the Nas as the secondary backup.

This is the one I was looking at, gives 3tb of storage in Raid 1 - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/... mybook duo&qid=1449697697&ref_=sr_1_2&sr=8-2

Things to note are that I do not currently have usb3 and when I get my new mac, desktop or laptop, I would really like to get an ssd so won't have room to store such large files locally. Off the top of my head my music library is around 550gb and photos are over 1tb.

Pretty sure Lightroom plays nice if you store your library on an external usb drive as does iTunes.

John, I am of the same thinking as you in that usb3 will be fast enough without the extra expense of thunderbolt.

Just mulling over the best way to do it. Keep the thoughts coming, would really like to get this all sorted over the festive period and your insight and thoughts are helping a lot.
 
I use bog-standard external harddrives. They don't take up any power ports, because they aren't plugged in 99.9% of the time. Plug them in to back stuff up after a shoot, unplug.

I've never understood photographers spending heaps of cash on networked storage systems. Unless you're in a big studio where lots of people need access to current stuff at the same time. What benefit does networked storage bring to your average one-man-band / home office photographer? It's expensive and slow, and introduces another point of potential failure.

Music maybe a different matter if you have piles of it. Personally I just stream it, less hassle.
 
Redundancy, higher volume capacity's, not to mention the additional capabilities of systems such as Synology, QNAP etc...

And speed isn't an issue.... ;)
 
Jayst84 said:
I use bog-standard external harddrives. They don't take up any power ports, because they aren't plugged in 99.9% of the time. Plug them in to back stuff up after a shoot, unplug.

I've never understood photographers spending heaps of cash on networked storage systems. Unless you're in a big studio where lots of people need access to current stuff at the same time. What benefit does networked storage bring to your average one-man-band / home office photographer? It's expensive and slow, and introduces another point of potential failure.

Music maybe a different matter if you have piles of it. Personally I just stream it, less hassle.
Click to expand...


I have a WD cloud connected to my network. Any important stuff is backed up to this. I have a Cat 5 cable from the Gigabit router to the WD Cloud which is kept in my garage. If my house goes up in smoke hopefully the garage will be ok.

If your house goes up in smoke will your data be ok?

Backing up music and films is stupid, you can always replace them, images are much harder to replace and most are irreplaceable!
 
Neilc28 said:
Redundancy, higher volume capacity's, not to mention the additional capabilities of systems such as Synology, QNAP etc...

And speed isn't an issue.... ;)
Click to expand...

Redundancy is based on the drives you have in your NAS, which you may or may not be able to recover from if one fails (or if the controller fails, or if the software throws a hissy fit) - just keep the drives separate, even better. Ditto capacity, that's down to the drives, just keep them separate. Additional capabilities was my question - what do they offer that's of any real benefit to a one-man-band, given the cost?

admirable said:
If my house goes up in smoke hopefully the garage will be ok.

If your house goes up in smoke will your data be ok?

Backing up music and films is stupid, you can always replace them, images are much harder to replace and most are irreplaceable!
Click to expand...

I don't have a house or a garage. Stuff should be off site (actually off site) to be completely safe. That's as easy, or easier with a standalone drive.

I wasn't saying back up music, I was saying storing a large library of music likely has different requirements to archives of photographs. Photos usually only need to be accessed rarely once they're archived, so you don't have any need for a network connection to the drive. On the other hand, if you want a huge music library available to various devices around your home / office, then sticking it on some kind of networked storage is probably a good idea.
 
I use a Synology NAS, in 2x disk RAID configuration, with additional external drives (a) one connected to the NAS as back-up, (b) one connected to my computer. All are vulnerable, of course, because they're in the same building.

A NAS could be set up remotely, maybe at a relatives house, as your personal 'Cloud', with local back-ups at your place.

Commercial Cloud solutions are popular, but the vulnerability lies in what happens if the Cloud company goes bust?

There's an on-going situation in France where the company went bust and users are still trying to get their data back years on; the administrators for the company say it's not there problem or responsibility to start up the servers, etc, for the data to be recovered, so users are in limbo.
 
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admirable said:
Backing up music and films is stupid, you can always replace them, images are much harder to replace and most are irreplaceable!
Click to expand...

While that's kind of true, if my iTunes library gets destroyed then it's going to be a lot more hassle (and possibly expense) than losing some photos. My music library goes back years - photos that are part of my business aren't usually needed longer than 12 months. IMO it's really key to work out how important each piece of data is before deciding how to back it up. There's no point spending £100 to back up a file that might cost you £50 if you lost it.

Also, iTunes hates having its music on a NAS. It has been supported for years but Apple's idea of supporting NAS is a long way short of most people's idea. If I were starting again I'd have an extra internal drive just for music and personal stuff. As it is, my music lives on a dedicated QNAP NAS and occasionally that gives issues.

Short answer is: current stuff lives on the internal, everything important goes to a RAIDed NAS as well, client stuff also gets backed up to their own USB drives. Really really important stuff lives on the Google Cloud and/or Dropbox since I think these are the cloud firms least likely to go bankrupt.
 
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