I run a small design studio with 4 Mac workstations + 1 Mac server and am looking to improve out current set-up.
- At present each Mac's work in progress is backed-up at the end of each day to a mobile HD that is taken off-sight each night.
- All completed jobs are archived to Blu-ray disc and stored off-sight. A copy of each job is also copied onto our Mac server (an old G5 with 2x 1 TB drives) so that we can access and re-call previous jobs quickly. These drives are backed-up twice daily to an attached 2 TB FW drive.
Now this system does work but I think it could be improved. My main issue is that all the server drives are in the same office. Should we suffer a break-in or natural disaster all that data could be lost. We would have our off-sight Blu-rays backups, but to re-install back to where we were would mean painstaking loading over 200 discs. We do have another office on a different floor of the building that is on our network so would a NAS solution for backup be safer than the current attached FW drive? Would it also be worth considering a RAID set-up for extra protection?
My second issue is that I would like to make use of TimeMachine for our workstations but not sure about the best way to go about it. Attached HDs makes sense but again unless taken off-sight every night we are susceptible to same risks as above.
Would be very interested to hear our other designers have their studios set-up. I don't want to over complicate things but I'm sure there is a better, safer solution out there.
- At present each Mac's work in progress is backed-up at the end of each day to a mobile HD that is taken off-sight each night.
- All completed jobs are archived to Blu-ray disc and stored off-sight. A copy of each job is also copied onto our Mac server (an old G5 with 2x 1 TB drives) so that we can access and re-call previous jobs quickly. These drives are backed-up twice daily to an attached 2 TB FW drive.
Now this system does work but I think it could be improved. My main issue is that all the server drives are in the same office. Should we suffer a break-in or natural disaster all that data could be lost. We would have our off-sight Blu-rays backups, but to re-install back to where we were would mean painstaking loading over 200 discs. We do have another office on a different floor of the building that is on our network so would a NAS solution for backup be safer than the current attached FW drive? Would it also be worth considering a RAID set-up for extra protection?
My second issue is that I would like to make use of TimeMachine for our workstations but not sure about the best way to go about it. Attached HDs makes sense but again unless taken off-sight every night we are susceptible to same risks as above.
Would be very interested to hear our other designers have their studios set-up. I don't want to over complicate things but I'm sure there is a better, safer solution out there.