External Hard Drive Storage Advice

Synology.

+1 on the Synology. Make sure you plan for enough disk space. You will need enough for your media plus time machine backups for all the computers. In addition, plan for a backup of the Synology.

Just another idea Lacie ( RAID capable) Promise Pegasus range ( I have the R4 ) but these are not cheap....the Lacie stuff is more affordable but built down to a budget...I guess we all have our preferences, but my Promise is rock solid and although expensive, you do get what you pay for.

mayone said:

what about this one?

http://www.synology.com/it-it/products/overview/DS213j

wich drives I can put in?

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Up to 8TB drives of your choice....I prefer to use enterprise drives for this type of thing....they are warrantied longer and have a more robust QC at manufacturer time, but you can put pretty much any decent 7200 drives in there. A BIG word of warning.....avoid Seagate, at the moment, they seem to have serious QC issues and we had 3 die within weeks of purchase. WD are a good bet...I have four in my R4, but they came with the unit and are under warranty still. The unit stores my media library so the unit gets a lot of use, but it's rock solid so the faster WD range would be worth a look. Sometimes it can work out cheaper to buy the unit with drives installed, but on the whole you are probably better off sourcing them yourself if you go down the Synology road. I can't say much about them as I've never owned any of their stuff, but many people here seem to recommend them.



That should say 8 TB of TOTAL storage space in that enclosure.

RAID is not for backups at all. Just to make that a clear point. However, getting a multi drive enclosure may solve what you want.

I can't recommend G-Drive enough, just brilliant quality, last ages, rugged too.

G-RAID
G-Drive

thunderbolt versions also, just brilliant, highly recommended

Regards

mayone said:

I know that's another thing, but with RAID is more safe!

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That's a misconception, and depends completely on which RAID configuration you use.
For example, RAID-0 is fast, but not safe, because if you lose one drive, you lose everything.

RAID is NOT necessarily part of a good backup strategy - particularly if the RAID is used in your daily workflow.
Many folks will tell you that it becomes more important to keep good backups of a RAID, than even your boot system drive.

Altemose said:

RAID is not for backups at all. Just to make that a clear point. However, getting a multi drive enclosure may solve what you want.

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Considering a backup is a copy of data stored in another location, I don't see a problem with using RAID for that purpose. Is it excessive to use a technology intended for improved speed as a backup destination? Maybe. Now, set that RAID as a mirrored setup or some other setup with redundancy (0+1 comes to mind) and it absolutely makes sense. A TRUE backup plan will include off-site backups though, if you didn't have that you would have NO fall-back if your computer and NAS burned up in a house fire, got crushed by a falling tree or swallowed by a sink hole.

I have 3 copies of all my most critical data: the HDD in my MBP, a TM backup on a WD external drive and cloud-based using CrashPlan. Even for my Windows desktop, when I was backing it up, external drives were for backup only unless I was truly archiving something that I hadn't used in a long time.

hallux said:

Considering a backup is a copy of data stored in another location, I don't see a problem with using RAID for that purpose. Is it excessive to use a technology intended for improved speed as a backup destination? Maybe. Now, set that RAID as a mirrored setup or some other setup with redundancy (0+1 comes to mind) and it absolutely makes sense. A TRUE backup plan will include off-site backups though, if you didn't have that you would have NO fall-back if your computer and NAS burned up in a house fire, got crushed by a falling tree or swallowed by a sink hole.

I have 3 copies of all my most critical data: the HDD in my MBP, a TM backup on a WD external drive and cloud-based using CrashPlan. Even for my Windows desktop, when I was backing it up, external drives were for backup only unless I was truly archiving something that I hadn't used in a long time.

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That is my point. People think RAID is a backup measure rather than multiple drives working together. My issue is with multiple drives adds to the chances of failure. One drive dies and then you have one big issue getting the RAID array working again.

Altemose said:

That is my point. People think RAID is a backup measure rather than multiple drives working together. My issue is with multiple drives adds to the chances of failure. One drive dies and then you have one big issue getting the RAID array working again.

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While I totally agree Raid is not a backup strategy. There should be no big issue with a drive failure using Raid 1, 5 or 6. Only Degraded performance until you replace the failed drive and allow the array to rebuild.

I use raid 5 myself with a four drive array and very happy with it. I keep a backup of the complete raid array as well as carbon copy images of both of my computers.

nebo1ss said:

While I totally agree Raid is not a backup strategy. There should be no big issue with a drive failure using Raid 1, 5 or 6. Only Degraded performance until you replace the failed drive and allow the array to rebuild.

I use raid 5 myself with a four drive array and very happy with it. I keep a backup of the complete raid array as well as carbon copy images of both of my computers.

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Now that is a good setup with the Carbon Copy images! My issue is that people design a RAID array, and then don't back it up.

nebo1ss said:

While I totally agree Raid is not a backup strategy. There should be no big issue with a drive failure using Raid 1, 5 or 6. Only Degraded performance until you replace the failed drive and allow the array to rebuild.

I use raid 5 myself with a four drive array and very happy with it. I keep a backup of the complete raid array as well as carbon copy images of both of my computers.

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Except that if another drive fails during the rebuild, then you lose everything. Any RAID is not a backup strategy. RAID gives you redundancy and protection against hard drive failure(except RAID 0). A backup solution gives you the ability to retrieve previous versions of a file. RAID will not do that.

Let's say for example you're running RAID 1 or RAID 10 and you feel that it is an adequate backup solution so your only copy of a file is on the RAID array. Then imagine that a file becomes corrupt or you make changes to it that were not intentional. Those changes/corruptions will immediately be copied to the other drive in the array. Thus you have no backup.

theSeb said:

Except that if another drive fails during the rebuild, then you lose everything. Any RAID is not a backup strategy. RAID gives you redundancy and protection against hard drive failure(except RAID 0). A backup solution gives you the ability to retrieve previous versions of a file. RAID will not do that.

Let's say for example you're running RAID 1 or RAID 10 and you feel that it is an adequate backup solution so your only copy of a file is on the RAID array. Then imagine that a file becomes corrupt or you make changes to it that were not intentional. Those changes/corruptions will immediately be copied to the other drive in the array. Thus you have no backup.

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That's NOT a "backup solution". People get confused there I think. A BACKUP is redundancy of files, hopefully stored in different physical locations. Storing data on a RAID (and ONLY on the RAID) is just storing the data externally to the laptop. Even a mirrored RAID isn't great (as you mentioned) as if you delete the file from the array it's gone. JUST storing your files on an external drive/device is NOT a backup just because it's a "backup drive". You need to keep those files in their original location too in order to maintain the idea of it being a backup.

hallux said:

That's NOT a "backup solution". People get confused there I think. A BACKUP is redundancy of files, hopefully stored in different physical locations. Storing data on a RAID (and ONLY on the RAID) is just storing the data externally to the laptop. Even a mirrored RAID isn't great (as you mentioned) as if you delete the file from the array it's gone. JUST storing your files on an external drive/device is NOT a backup just because it's a "backup drive". You need to keep those files in their original location too in order to maintain the idea of it being a backup.

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Indeed. The problem is that many people believe that having one copy of their data an on external RAID array (DAS or NAS) means that their data is "backed-up".

[[ A backup solution gives you the ability to retrieve previous versions of a file ]]

Certain backup solutions provide that ability.
Others do not.

Personally, I have never cared about maintaining "previous versions" of files on my computers.
All I'm really concerned about are backups of the files as they exist "at the moment".

For this reason, I maintain "cloned" backups that intentionally over-write older versions of files. That is what I want.

I will guess that the overwhelming majority of personal computer users have the same needs, insofar as "backing up" is concerned.

Not everyone, but most.

I'm paranoid about losing files, which is why to this point I've not lost anything.

I presently have two separate Time Machine drives (which, thanks to Mavricks, gets automatically rotated) and I keep a duplicate of irreplaceable files on a portable drive which is kept at the office (in case, gods forbid, the house burns down or something). I bring it home around once every two weeks and reduplicate it all.

jakesaunders27 said:

I can't recommend G-Drive enough, just brilliant quality, last ages, rugged too.

G-RAID
G-Drive

thunderbolt versions also, just brilliant, highly recommended

Regards

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I wanted to want these too. But the reviews on amazon are not good. The company should work on improving those if they want to be tops.

Fishrrman said:

[[ A backup solution gives you the ability to retrieve previous versions of a file ]]

Certain backup solutions provide that ability.
Others do not.

Personally, I have never cared about maintaining "previous versions" of files on my computers.
All I'm really concerned about are backups of the files as they exist "at the moment".

For this reason, I maintain "cloned" backups that intentionally over-write older versions of files. That is what I want.

I will guess that the overwhelming majority of personal computer users have the same needs, insofar as "backing up" is concerned.

Not everyone, but most.

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You really believe that most people never need to revert to an old version of a document, or never delete a file by mistake?

PicnicTutorials said:

I wanted to want these too. But the reviews on amazon are not good. The company should work on improving those if they want to be tops.

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Strange, I've had nothing but a good experience with G-Technology.