What storage should i get for new imac

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*kev*

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I've got the money saved up to buy an ivy bridge iMac as soon as thy are released. I will be moving over from a PC and my iMac will be used for my image editing, my wife will continue to use the PC for her use and work.

I want storage that ensures everything is backed up and and potentially that data is available from either machine and on 2 laptops (1 MacBook and 1 PC). So my question is, what would be the best storage to have so I have all bases covered, my current thoughts are

a NAS to store everything on so that I can access all the data I currently have on my PC from any of the computers, and back this up onto an external hard drive weekly
Continue using the external hard drive that my PC currently backs up onto for PC backups
An external hard drive to store images on from my mac to save filling the internal hd up too quickly, and for quicker access than the NAS would likely give
Continue using the time machine backup drive for y MacBook
And an external drive to use time machine to backup the new iMac on to.

To me this seems like a lot of drives, is this the best way of storing everything, is there a simpler way and is there a way of getting the same level of backups with fewer drives?

Thanks in advance

Kev
 
whats your budget?

personally i run a NAS for all of my photos, music, video etc and have no problems. my lightroom RAW files are on the NAS (catalogue is stored locally), sure its not as fast as a local drive but its not too slow.

might be worth looking at a NAS with USB/eSata external drive connectivity like a synology unit, they can backup direct via that port.
 
Thanks for your comments Neil. Budget wise I'd looked at synology and Qnap NAS solutions with 2 x 2tb drives on them and this comes to around the £400 mark, which is more than I would like to spend. So I would like to £200 but could probably spend up to £300.

Has anyone else got thoughts on the best way to organise drives, preferred brands and or setups?

Thanks

Kev
 
I'm waiting for the ivy bridge mac's to launch too, hoping that the SSD +HDD option is a bit more reasonably priced now that it'll be 2nd generation. I use a drobo unit for local back up with 4x 2tb drives.

Might be a bit more than you want to pay though, unless you bought 2nd hand without drives.
 
Thanks for your input digitalfailure, i spoke with the Drobo guy at focus on imaging, and i was told that it's not easy to get it to work across a mac and PC at the same time. Is that correct or was he just treat me gently woth my limited networking knowledge?
 
*kev* said:
Thanks for your input digitalfailure, i spoke with the Drobo guy at focus on imaging, and i was told that it's not easy to get it to work across a mac and PC at the same time. Is that correct or was he just treat me gently woth my limited networking knowledge?
Click to expand...

I wouldn't know m8, i only have the standard drobo connected via FireWire. There are people on here who have the networked version though, it must be doable to get pc and mac on the same network in this day and age.
 
*kev* said:
Thanks for your input digitalfailure, i spoke with the Drobo guy at focus on imaging, and i was told that it's not easy to get it to work across a mac and PC at the same time. Is that correct or was he just treat me gently woth my limited networking knowledge?
Click to expand...

Don't know why it wouldn't to be honest, if you got the fs one with the network it should be capable of sharing to multiple platforms.
 
*kev* said:
Has anyone else got thoughts on the best way to organise drives, preferred brands and or setups?

Thanks

Kev
Click to expand...

depends how many bays you have, raid5 would give you best amount of storage vs protection.

I used to favour Samsung drives but they're getting few and far between since seagate took over.
 
I have an iMac, 2 x MacBooks and a couple of win laptops. ( XP and Win 7) I tried a Qnap TS119p II NAS, and while it worked it was fine, but its currently waiting to be returned and due to the many hours I spent over the last few weeks trying to get it to work as I want it, I have given up.

So, I currently have my iMac connected via Cat5e ( gigabit) to a Cisco router and onto a Billion Modem. The other stuff connects wirelessly.
Connected to the iMac I have a 500gb Western Digital My Book that I use for Time Machine ( This saves hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month until the volume runs out of space. At that point, Time Machine deletes the oldest weekly backup and overwrites it)

I don't see the point of backing this up separately.

Then I have a 1TB WD drive that holds a regularly updated Clone of my system and other documents and my Aperture and iPhoto libraries.
It all seems to work fine. I can connect to the iMac from my MacBooks and view all my photos on the Aperture and iPhoto libraries and anything else stored on the 1TB drive.

Just for a bit of fun, if I am sitting anywhere in the house using my Macbook, I can connect to my iMac and share the screen so I can access anything on the iMac. Saves me getting up!. And then, i have Team Viewer 7 which means I can also connect straight to my iMac when I am away from home, on my Macbook and take over the screen.

Its all much simpler than the NAS. I have 2 x 2TB drives spare now since the NAS has gone. I might buy a couple of enclosures and swap them with the two WD drives so I will have 4TB of storage for all my stuff.

I also have a couple of portable hard drives that I can use to back up the 2 MacBooks with Time Machine,

Allan
 
Thanks for this Allanm, this sounds l,I've a more affordable option, but what springs to mind is how do you access the stuff on your iMac from the windows machines?

Just out of interest what were the problems you had with your NAS drive?

Thanks

Kev
 
What did you struggle with out of interest Allen?

Also you say you don't see the point of backing up you time machine drive? What happens if something accidentally destroys your mac copy and the time machine drive? Always factor in the worst case scenario :)
 
Hi Neil,

What would you suggest would be the best options to have all my bases covered. Without spending stupid amounts and having redundancy. Say £500 as an absolute max budget, which would give me the ability to share files across mac and windows, backup my iMac (MacBook) already has a dedicated USB drive for time machine, windows machine also has a dedicated USB backup drive.

Would a 4 bay Nas in raid 5 give me the storage (obviously dependant on the size of drives i put on) and redundancy I require, and then have a time machine backup on a separate drive and would it be necessary to back up the NAS or would raid 5 cover that?

Thanks for your help

Kevin
 
Does anyone else have any ideas thoughts or suggestions on a setup?

Thanks

Kev
 
sorry kevin been a bit manic.

personally for 500 i would..

qnap ts-410 or ts-412 4 bay NAS ± 240-250
3x 2tb drives ± 80 each

run it in RAID5 which will give you around 3.7tb roughly and will allow a single drive failure. and will let you grow by adding another 2tb drive.

use the existing external drives you have to backup the qnap via the usb port on the rear.
 
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I run a mac mini as a media & file store with 2 x 4 bay drobo's connected by FireWire 800, networked from then on wirelessly to MacBook Pro, 2 Windows laptops and they all see each other over the network fine.
Originally I tried to setup a windows based main computer which caused all sorts of issues, for me at least mac was the easiest network & sharing option.
 
neil_g said:
out of interest what issues?
Click to expand...

For some reason the shared folders were visible to some or all other computers at various times, very rarely could everyone access the files as they needed them. Maybe it was something I did wrong when setting up but I could not get a consistently stable setup at all.
 
MBZ3147 said:
For some reason the shared folders were visible to some or all other computers at various times, very rarely could everyone access the files as they needed them. Maybe it was something I did wrong when setting up but I could not get a consistently stable setup at all.
Click to expand...

Certainly doesn't sound normal, I'd suspect a permissions issue maybe (without looking hard to tell obviously)
 
Thanks for your input Neil,

i'll have to see how much the new macs cost but that looks like a good way of keeping everything safe. It also means i can network my printer using the USB ports on the NAS.
 
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