Help me choose my storage solution

Yesterday MacRumors helped me pick my next Mac. Today, I'm looking for a solution for storing my photography and video libraries.

I'm a photographer and have been doing some video lately. Yesterday I bought a 27" iMac i7 3.4Ghz with 2GB graphics and a 1TB fusion drive. Aperture is just screaming on this thing.

The one bottleneck with my new iMac is storage. I have about 4TB of photos and video in archives on multiple drives and my working library is about 300GB. I could have paid a little more for a 3TB Fusion drive but I'd still have the same problem: having to regularly go through my library to archive photos I don't plan to need on hand. I'm trying to avoid this and just have one Pro Library (including all the archived images) and one Personal Library.

So I'm leaving that 1TB for everything other than photos and video libraries. Which means that I need an external drive for this purpose.

I've been looking at the Drobo but will having my photo library on an external drive slow down Aperture?

For Aperture experts: How do I get around this? Can I have my library with previews on the iMac's Fusion Drive and then the master images on an external drive?

For storage experts: I want to have local redundancy to protect against hardware failure but I also want to have a drive that I can store off site. Does the Drobo permit this? If I had 3 HDD's in the Drobo, can it use two to mirror eachother and then one to carry off site?

I just noticed that the LaCie 2Big Thunderbolt has a delivery window of 1-2 months. The Apple store I called tells me they no longer have them in stock. Has LaCie announced something new?

I know Thunderbolt is still developing and these first generation external drives are bound to have teething issues. Thunderbolt on PCs are starting to trickle in so the market is bound to expand this year.

I can afford to wait another month or two as I re-organize my library on the internal 1TB Fusion Drive, back up to a local Time Capsule and to a 1TB WD MyPassport Studio drive for offsite backup.

Anything new announced at CES or elsewhere?

I don't trust Time Machine. I own a Time Capsule and I won't throw it out, but it's given me nothing but trouble.

Last year after coming back from a month long trip, I unloaded all my photos and videos into Aperture on my MacBookPro. It happily backed up to Time Capsule as it had been for over the year that I've owned it.

Weeks later, I unloaded that Aperture library on to an external WD MyBook 1TB for archiving and when turning around, I tipped that drive over and it tapped the desk lightly. **click click click** I thought, no problem, I have my Time Capsule which had just recently backed up. I opened Time Machine and it couldn't load the drive. I tried to mount the .sparsebundle manually and look for the recent backup but it's corrupted. Likely because I had just recently updated to Mountain Lion and the original Time Machine had been set up with Snow Leopard. It's been 2 years now and I haven't been able to read the data off my Time Capsule. Yesterday I tried to open it up so I could run it as a standalone external HDD and ran every possible fix. Nothing could mount that Time Machine backup.

I've given up on the photos from that trip. It's cheaper and less aggravating to just do the trip again than to try to recover the photos off either the broken HDD or the corrupted Time Capsule.

Luckily for me, all my work had been stored on dual offsite HDDs stored in my safety deposit box at the bank. I just lost that trip and nothing more, no thanks to Time Machine.

LaCieTech said:

ipedro, the 2big Thunderbolt is available on LaCie's site and at other resellers.

LaCie announced the new 5big Thunderbolt at CES this year, which offers up to 20TB of storage. Check this page for more info on all of LaCie's Thunderbolt products: http://www.lacie.com/us/more/?id=10149

Thanks,
TL, LaCie

Click to expand...

LaCie Tech, I sent this to you in a PM but I think the thread could benefit from your response to this question:

Thanks for your input in the thread about a backup solution.

I'd like to please get your feedback on what I plan to do:

I purchased the LaCie 2Big 6TB. I consulted with an Apple Genius and it appears that my original intent seems to be the way to go:

1 - Aperture library kept small (no masters) on the iMac's internal Fusion Drive
2 - Masters kept on the LaCie in RAID 1.
3 - Rotate 3 HDDs inside the LaCie and off site. 2 kept on site mirroring eachother in RAID 1 and another kept off site. Every week or so, bring a drive home and swap it out with one of the drives in the LaCie.

...though there is stlll a lingering question:

Q: Will the LaCie need to reformat the new drive and copy everything over again or will it simply fill in the differences since it was last plugged in? The Apple Genius thinks that it varies by drive manufacturer but that the LaCie appears to be hot swappable.

LaCie even sells drives with the bracket that seems to be for this very purpose.

If it needs to rebuild the entire RAID every time, then this will put too much of a burden on the drives that need to be read and re-written every time they're swapped. If the incoming drive only needs to be updated, then this is not much more than if it were in the bay the whole time and is a viable solution.

Click to expand...

twitch31 said:

I would not recommend pulling drives in and out of a RAID array as a regular practice. I think it is also dangerous practice to separate masters from catalogues as is complicates backups and (more importantly) recovery especially if that recovery is to be done by someone other than you.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestions Twitch.

As I've had the opportunity to get to know my new LaCie 2Big 6TB, I'm revising my strategy.

Requirements:

a) I do want to keep my masters separate from my Aperture Library because too many times has my Aperture Library become corrupted (i.e. software updates) and after I repaired the library, several masters were missing.

b) I want to have my working library on my Fusion Drive. I paid for SSD speeds by upgrading to an SSD+HDD FusionDrive so I want to take advantage of it. Having my Aperture library on an external HDD will never accomplish this. I don't have room for my masters on the iMac so I can't have them both together.

c) I want to keep it simple: only 2 libraries, one for Pro one for Personal. Multiple libraries can easily get lost scattered across different drives and makes it harder to find what I'm looking for at a glance. i.e. all my 5 star photos ever or photos marked with certain keywords.

After using Aperture for years, it's my experience that despite what Apple claims, in practice smaller libraries run smooth as butter but once it gets bigger than say 50GB, things tend to be much less responsive. Once I'm done moving all my masters out, I should end up with a library of previews smaller than 50GB. Even 100GB would be a major improvement over my often 400GB+ libraries.

d) I need on site HDD failure protection and rotating offsite backups to protect against theft/disaster. The offsite drives need to fit in a safety deposit box so a 3.5 HDD with enclosure is ruled out. 2.5 HDDs are either too expensive or don't exist in sufficient capacities. A naked 3.5 HDD may be needed, stored in an antistatic pouch.

Solutions:

Pro and Personal libraries on iMac 1TB FusionDrive. Masters on LaCie 3TBx2 RAID-1.

The FusionDrive will prioritize my 50GB library to the SSD because it will always be open and/or very frequently accessed. When I need a master for exporting, the Thunderbolt speed will be more than fast enough to access the masters tucked away. The mirrored RAID-1 HDDs protect me against hardware failure (unless they both fail together).

For backups...

Masters -- Two 3TB HDDs + a USB3 3.5 SATA dock that I can drop them into. I'll use Time Machine to give me the ability to go back to a certain date in case I delete something. I'll keep one docked, regularly backing up the Masters HDD. Every week or so, I'll drop one off at the bank and pick up the other.

Library -- A 3TB Time Capsule will back up my iMac's FusionDrive. Carbonite will back up my 50GB Aperture Library to the cloud.

Everything will work on its own. All I have to do is rotate those safety deposit box HDDs every week or so, and it's as simple as dropping it into the dock when I come home from the bank. No complex backup schedules and actions that I easily lose track of.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

I considered those extra mobile HDDs and I might still use just one (I have a brand new 1TB WD MyPassport Studio) but I'm trying to avoid making the backup routine too complex. I don't want to put too much of my efforts into managing my library if I can help it. I want to use my time to be creative.

My Time Capsule has a Kensington Lock and will be backing up my iMac. If a thief happened to come into my place, I don't think they'd put too much effort cutting off my Time Capsule. They'd probably grab the expensive stuff.

Nonetheless, my backup system is geared towards a last resort catastrophic situation where I'd still be able to recover my life's work. If my iMac got stolen, no doubt so would all my photo equipment. I wouldn't be up and running again in a day. I don't do work that is that time sensitive anyway and pleasing an impatient client would be the least of my concerns.

Nonetheless, I might still use that 1TB MyPassport Studio as my offsite Time Machine and save myself the $55 a year for the Carbonite.