Drobo Alternative... Help Needed

[jrmarts]

Hello! I'm looking for some help, all of the searching has lead me down the rabbit hole of NAS, but I'm looking for a DAS to replace my aging Drobos. I currently have to one backing up the other and rotated off site regularly. I have about 14TB of data that I manage (been a professional photographer for 15+ years). I used to be on top of all of this information, but haven't paid attention for several years now.

Do I need to pick a solution with RAID, or can I just pick up a couple 20-24TB external drives? My storage is currently attached to my Mac Mini M4. I do not use the DAS for editing, just storage and archiving. I move the date between my computers on a 1TB SSD.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Bigwaff]

Do I need to pick a solution with RAID, or can I just pick up a couple 20-24TB external drives?

RAID not required, although RAID1 enclosure could be ideal. Really comes down to tolerance for failure and access speed. Since archiving seems the main purpose, access speed can be slow USB, although migrating off Drobo will be painfully slow regardless. With RAID1 enclosure, if a drive fail, you can still access data. Replace failed drive and enclosure rebuild RAID while you can still access data.

I think RAID1 enclosure with 2x 20-24TB drives and 1x 24TB enclosure for back up of RAID to take off site.

 

[chabig]

I think RAID1 enclosure with 2x 20-24TB drives and 1x 24TB enclosure for back up of RAID to take off site.

I like this idea, but I would suggest 2 x 24TB backups in rotation so one can backup the RAID and one can always be offsite.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

There are now 28TB single HDDs available. You could buy a "one-bay" enclosure and have double current storage on one drive. Buy a second to be the backup and store it offsite. Regularly rotate the 2 to keep their contents fresh. You could also dodge the cost of 2 enclosures and buy a HDD dock for this and use them as bare drives. There are plastic cases for bare drives too.

A great Mac tool for easy synching is Choronosync but it's not the only one. Many swear by Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper too. Yes, you could just manually keep them up to date, but those kinds of tools make it very easy & quick.

Defer the RAID-type enclosure purchases until you get to maybe 80% of what can fit on such drives. And use your existing drives as "one more backup" at home/office. If the Drobo is conking, you might just pick up a simple HDD dock and some plastic cases for the Drobo HDD drives and use them as a JBOD (bare drives).

If you just really want a NAS, I much favor Synology myself. Buy one with plenty of bays, load it up with your drives, pool storage using their SHR (RAID 5-like) option and then you can easily grow storage over time by replacing one of the drives with a bigger one when you need more space. Unlike classic RAID, instead of having to rebuild the pooled storage, SHR just dynamically expands the space. Here's a storage calculator for "what if" purposes.

Synology has a great implementation of "whole home" Time Machine for backing up 1+ Macs in the home using the built-in TM software and many other available apps useful to us Mac people. For example, own your own cloud (no monthly rent fees), set up a whole home DVR for all AppleTVs in the house, security cam station, upload all photos, and many more.

 

[haralds]

Being a professional photographer, protecting your assets should be a top priority. I would not skimp on this.

My recommendation is to look at Synology NAS running BTRFS RAID 6. If a drive fails, you can pull it from the running system and plug in a replacement. I wold choose a system with 4 or 5 drives.
They are easy to use with a Mac-like desktop and high reliability. They pretty much run themselves.
Get two of them for easy off-site replication. The offsite version could have a simpler drive setup.

 

[ChrisA]

Hello! I'm looking for some help, all of the searching has lead me down the rabbit hole of NAS, but I'm looking for a DAS to replace my aging Drobos. I currently have to one backing up the other and rotated off site regularly. I have about 14TB of data that I manage (been a professional photographer for 15+ years). I used to be on top of all of this information, but haven't paid attention for several years now.

Do I need to pick a solution with RAID, or can I just pick up a couple 20-24TB external drives? My storage is currently attached to my Mac Mini M4. I do not use the DAS for editing, just storage and archiving. I move the date between my computers on a 1TB SSD.

Any help would be appreciated.

A pro photographer with about 20TB of data. I assume your business depends on this data and it's not just "old junk". In that case, you need not the normal "1, 2, 3" backup system but a "1,2, 4" system. This means there wil always be at least 4 copies of the data.

It also seems kind of primitive to "sneakernet" your data in an SSD. Why do you not have a network?

What I'd suggest and what I do is have a NAS that is the central place where all your data lives. You NEVER move the data to a computer. All the data is always simultaneously available to every computer, phone, and tablet if you are at home or on travel halfway around the world, your entire collection is there on whatever device you are using. Of course the speed of access varies. It is much faster on 10GBE wired conection them on WiFi and even slower over the cell network.

Buy a Synology NAS and put your stuff there. This central NAS should be 2X redundent, in other words, set up so that it can still function with two dead drives.

The first level of backup is a second, cheaper NAS that is setup to keep itself in sync wit the main system. It does this continuously. Synology can be set to keep file version history so you have older version of you files always available.

As you need four copies of "livelihood critical data" keep a hard drive in a fire safe at some remote location. This means you need to own TWO hard drives and rotate them as you never not have data at the remote place.

For a fourth copy subscribe to a cloud service and set it to continously pull form the main NAS


Yes, this is expensive but if it is not just a hoby what is $6K to protect irreplaceable data that if lost you'd be a homeless beggar. But if it is just old files you will never use again, just buy a hard drive and a fire safe.

 

[haralds]

I totally agree with @ChrisA.
One other thought: periodically test the backups!

 

[ChrisA]

Being a professional photographer, protecting your assets should be a top priority. I would not skimp on this.

My recommendation is to look at Synology NAS running BTRFS RAID 6. If a drive fails, you can pull it from the running system and plug in a replacement. I wold choose a system with 4 or 5 drives.
They are easy to use with a Mac-like desktop and high reliability. They pretty much run themselves.
Get two of them for easy off-site replication. The offsite version could have a simpler drive setup.

This is EXACTLY what I wrote, but you were more clear. But even so, this only gets the OP two of his four copies. I would add at least a cloud backup like Backblaze.

To add more detail to what we both are saying
1) For a main NAS, look at the DS923+ or DS1522+.
2) for the second NAS that is only a shadow/backup of the above look at the cheaper DS223j

The 223j can have fewer and larger hard drives. You can set them up to "failover" so that if anything fails, a drive or even the entire NAS, you are still online

 

[Alameda]

Hello! I'm looking for some help, all of the searching has lead me down the rabbit hole of NAS, but I'm looking for a DAS to replace my aging Drobos. I currently have to one backing up the other and rotated off site regularly. I have about 14TB of data that I manage (been a professional photographer for 15+ years). I used to be on top of all of this information, but haven't paid attention for several years now.

Do I need to pick a solution with RAID, or can I just pick up a couple 20-24TB external drives? My storage is currently attached to my Mac Mini M4. I do not use the DAS for editing, just storage and archiving. I move the date between my computers on a 1TB SSD.

I moved from Drobo to Synology NAS. Pretty much same situation as you. I have a lot of thoughts on this subject.

First, you need to put together your storage and backup strategy. You have to value your data and you have to figure out for yourself what combination of manual and automatic tasks you want to implement. I have some suggestions.

In your case, I think you should separate your 2+ year old photos from your recent. To me, it makes no sense to rotate 24 TB of photos between a remote and local location, when 20 TB of that data is very unlikely to change. Consider cataloging everything 2023 and older onto three large drives. Keep two offsite and one of them unattached to your computer but available. DONE.

This leaves you with a 4 TB problem, not a 24 TB problem. And 4 TB is great to work with, because there are a lot of inexpensive 4 TB SSD drives which are extremely fast and small. So you can either rotate these into offsite storage or back them up to the cloud as you work with them. Personally, I create one folder for each year, and inside the year, I create a folder in the format YYYY-MM-DD <Description>. If I shoot a lot in a particular month, I create a month folder. very basic and manageable for me.

I bought a Synology box and I use it. It has pros and cons:
Cons:

• It's expensive
• It's more complex to manage than a direct-attached drive. There is a YouTube channel called SpaceRex that has excellent Synology tutorials, but you have to carefully follow each step and make sure you do everything correctly.
• It is extremely slow on a 1 gbs network. You can get 2.5 or 10 gbs Ethernet and Synology units with a SSD cache which make them much faster. Just extra money.

Pros:

• Great for automation, especially with multiple computers.
• Great for Time Machine. I run Time Machine for everything except my photos and it just runs in the background and I never think about it.
• The storage is redundant; if a drive dies it still keeps working.
• It automatically backs itself up. I have a 14 TB drive directly attached but it can also back itself up to another Synology somewhere else on the Internet. So you can use it for automatic offsite backup.
• It can interface to a UPS. We get occasionally blackouts, and I have mine connected via USB to a UPS, so when the power goes out, the Synology will keep running for 30 minutes, and if the blackout is longer than that, the Synology unit will gracefully shut itself down automatically, preventing data corruption.
• You can remotely access everything on your Synology over the Internet. Kind of slow but it works if you need a file. I used to give clients remote access, but it's faster and easier to put the files up on Google Drive or similar.

 

[JamesMay82]

I left drobo a couple years ago and it was the best thing I did. It was always breaking down.

I know everyone raves about NAS and I’ve not tried it but I was never impressed with the time capsule wireless set up as it was painfully slow and I’m ignorantly tarring NAS with that same brush lol..

I have a LaCie 2 big set to raid 0 for all the manuals big files I manage and then another one in raid 0 which is does all my Time Machine for the first LaCie and my computer.

More recently I’ve just moved to a 2TB Samsung t7 SSD and that is my main drive with all my daily files..

 

[hobowankenobi]

Another vote for Synology. Don't skimp on a low-power model...performance is poor, and you will regret it. At the very low end, something like: DiskStation DS423+

For your use, I would go with (at least) a 4-bay box so you have room to grow as well as hot swap drives if needed. Did this at work (moving from DAS Drobo to Synology NAS) for art image archives, with about 20TB of data. It was successful, and would do the same again.


Synology Drive is a great sync tool, especially for granular folders or file selections. They also offer web link based sharing of files, which might be very useful.

For serious protection, as others have stated, all of this data should be mirrored to a second device, preferably at a second location.