External Storage

antc

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've got a machine that acts as a NAS and has about 12TB of storage in it. This is then all backed up using Backblaze. Photos are RAID 1 protected.
 
My iMac has my main storage on it. Two 5Tb external USB 3 drives - one a backup to the other.

Also have two 4Tb Firewire Drives that I use as a dumping ground for transient/non-important stuff.

BlackBlaze the important stuff.

Also have a 2Tb drive connected to an Airport Extreme hub to use for laptop TimeMachine backups/transient stuff. Not that bothered about the laptop backups really as all the data is cloud-backed up anyway, just seemed easy to set it up.
 
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.
Click to expand...

The important stuff hey - work stuff I can recreate, can't recreate the photos/videos etc.

My stuff like that I have *live* on my internal drive on the iMac, but copies via TimeMachine, and point-in time, to two external 5Tb drives. They also get backed up via BackBlaze.

Overkill? Possibly. I'd rather overkill such stuff, than be left wishing I'd have put a bit more effort in.
 
Rilot said:
I've got a machine that acts as a NAS and has about 12TB of storage in it. This is then all backed up using Backblaze. Photos are RAID 1 protected.
Click to expand...

Similar here. HP Microserver running FreeNAS with RAID-Z. Re-used the drives I had installed in Firewire caddies (that kept burning out the PSUs). It's been running 24x7 for about 3 years now without missing a beat.
 
I have a RAID 1 WD connected via firewire that creates a clone of my Mac's internal drive every evening (I use carbon copy cloner to update the clone).

I have a LaCie 20TB 5big Thunderbolt connected for Time Machine and expansion. Everything important is backed up to AWS using Arq. Arq runs a delta backup every hour.
 
MacRS4 said:
My iMac has my main storage on it. Two 5Tb external USB 3 drives - one a backup to the other.

Also have two 4Tb Firewire Drives that I use as a dumping ground for transient/non-important stuff.

BlackBlaze the important stuff.

Also have a 2Tb drive connected to an Airport Extreme hub to use for laptop TimeMachine backups/transient stuff. Not that bothered about the laptop backups really as all the data is cloud-backed up anyway, just seemed easy to set it up.
Click to expand...

I am wondering about having a lot of external single drives. That is where I am at, at the moment. Just been looking at usb3 wd my book duo. Perhaps setting it up in a raid 1 config, thus having two copies of your data in one unit? Perhaps a couple of those units rather than a nas?


MacRS4 said:
The important stuff hey - work stuff I can recreate, can't recreate the photos/videos etc.

My stuff like that I have *live* on my internal drive on the iMac, but copies via TimeMachine, and point-in time, to two external 5Tb drives. They also get backed up via BackBlaze.

Overkill? Possibly. I'd rather overkill such stuff, than be left wishing I'd have put a bit more effort in.
Click to expand...

I don't have any off site backup at the minute, my internet connection isn't fast enough. But my thinking was the more copies the better.

MagicBoy said:
Similar here. HP Microserver running FreeNAS with RAID-Z. Re-used the drives I had installed in Firewire caddies (that kept burning out the PSUs). It's been running 24x7 for about 3 years now without missing a beat.
Click to expand...

If I was going to do this I think I would go the NAS route, I don't really want another "machine" sat there, weather that be a micro server or something else. Would much rather have a NAS. Smaller, uses less power and easier to hide away somewhere.

shine said:
I have a RAID 1 WD connected via firewire that creates a clone of my Mac's internal drive every evening (I use carbon copy cloner to update the clone).

I have a LaCie 20TB 5big Thunderbolt connected for Time Machine and expansion. Everything important is backed up to AWS using Arq. Arq runs a delta backup every hour.
Click to expand...

Hdd clone sounds a good idea! Just seen the prices on the 20b 5big! What a beast, that would give me loads of storage to grow into.
 
Mirroring / RAID 1 is ok for live high availability, but it's not much of a backup really. Lose 1 drive, and you still have access to your *current* data. Get some corruption though and it's replicated to the second drive.

I used to go the RAID route...Can't be bothered now, I just stick to a bunch of disks, far simpler and gives me good point in time recovery too.
 
Running a similar setup to MacRS4. 5 external drives in total for various types of media and scheduled rsyncs for duplication. I've considered moving to a Drobo DAS (or NAS) but have kept moving back to the multiple externals idea because I can tuck them away in the TV stand where my Mac mini is. Plus I keep seeing those crazy deals on the forest!

Rilot / MacRS4 - what's your reason for going with BackBlaze? At work and home I've always used Crashplan (only had to use it once for a real failure recovery)
 
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MacRS4 said:
Mirroring / RAID 1 is ok for live high availability, but it's not much of a backup really. Lose 1 drive, and you still have access to your *current* data. Get some corruption though and it's replicated to the second drive.
Click to expand...

That's true, I like to have a clone in case I lose MBP. That way I only lose the last 24 hours data and can mount the clone on the Macmini to keep working as if I still had my MBP.
 
MacRS4 said:
Mirroring / RAID 1 is ok for live high availability, but it's not much of a backup really. Lose 1 drive, and you still have access to your *current* data. Get some corruption though and it's replicated to the second drive.

I used to go the RAID route...Can't be bothered now, I just stick to a bunch of disks, far simpler and gives me good point in time recovery too.
Click to expand...

Totally get your point, I was thinking of it more as direct attached storage that would be faster than NAS access to whatever files are on it.

So say you have 5 disks, what/how are you backing upto them? Are you Time machining all of them, in turn? As I do with my two?


shiver said:
Running a similar setup to MacRS4. 5 external drives in total for various types of media and scheduled rsyncs for duplication. I've considered moving to a Drobo DAS (or NAS) but have kept moving back to the multiple externals idea because I can tuck them away in the TV stand where my Mac mini is. Plus I keep seeing those crazy deals on the forest!
Click to expand...

So across your 5 drives, do you have multiple copies of all sets of your data? For example multiple copies of music, docs, photos etc? Can you tell me more about Rsync? Not heard of it before?

shine said:
That's true, I like to have a clone in case I lose MBP. That way I only lose the last 24 hours data and can mount the clone on the Macmini to keep working as if I still had my MBP.
Click to expand...

I am thinking the cloning of the hdd sounds like a great idea, are you creating the clone and then just storing that on a larger drive or do you have an external drive the same size as the one in your Mac and just clone to that so you could swap it out if the internal one ever failed?

I have an application called chrono sync which does clones and hourly backups etc (backup to your time frame basically)
 
I am thinking the cloning of the hdd sounds like a great idea, are you creating the clone and then just storing that on a larger drive or do you have an external drive the same size as the one in your Mac and just clone to that so you could swap it out if the internal one ever failed?

I have an application called chrono sync which does clones and hourly backups etc (backup to your time frame basically)
Click to expand...

The external drive is the same size, but that is purely by chance.
 
shine said:
The external drive is the same size, but that is purely by chance.
Click to expand...

fair enough :)

My thinking was if you used an external drive for a clone, it made sense in my head for it to be the same size, then if the main one failed you can swap in the clone and job done.
 
My internal drive is a 1TB SSD, the external 2 x 1TB HDD's. I would only use the clone until the I sourced a replacement SSD.

The HDD would be just too slow! :D
 
Cloud back up is the way forward... I'll just invest in some basic backups and mainly move my stuff to cloud (I use onedrive as it is, and it does me fine). I do have over 4tb of data growing up with photos and videos, plus digital design work and memories of my stuff on my pc. But meh
 
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