Elegant Solution for Media Library and Backup

[FakeSteveJobs]

Hey guys,

Need some ideas on external storage and backup.

I'm planning to buy a Macbook Air to replace my aging Macbook but the tiny SSD drive will be too small to store my lossless music collection and HD movies (currently around 500GB but will certainly grow over the 4-5 years I intend to use the machine; in this time, 1-2 TB would be a reasonable guess) so I'll need an External HD to store my files.

I also need to backup: I'd like frequent backups to be made of the internal SSD drive but the media library only needs to be protected from accidental deletion/drive failure: there's no need for incremental backups.

The natural solution is to get two disks: one backup disk (media and internal SSD so bigger than media alone) and one for my media library but I want to preserve desk space as much as possible. With two external HD's, I'm going to have a lot of cables, power supplies and (potentially) noise and ugliness. It'd be nice to avoid this as far as possible. Is there a nice enclosure that could house two disks of different sizes? Something that looks like an Iomega UltraMax or a Lacie Little Big Disk would look great on my desk. NAS, maybe? Stick everything on a big RAID disk (including internal Time Machine Backups, which will be small by comparison to my media collection so this isn't massively inefficient) with mirroring? Of course, this won't save me from accidentally deleting my media...

Cheaper is better, upgradable is also good but quality and reliability ultimately win.

I'm not currently interested in streaming (yet): I listen to my audio through a high quality DAC and headphones and I watch movies on my Mac.

Thanks.

 

[GGJstudios]

I'm planning to buy a Macbook Air to replace my aging Macbook but the tiny SSD drive will be too small to store my lossless music collection and HD movies

One option is to split your iTunes library, keeping your favorite music/movies on the SSD so you have it when you're mobile, with the remainder on an external drive.

How to split a single iTunes library over two or more media locations

The natural solution is to get two disks: one backup disk (media and internal SSD so bigger than media alone) and one for my media library but I want to preserve desk space as much as possible.

You could get one drive and partition it, using one partition for backups and the other for additional storage. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of my drive, or you can selectively backup only those folders you choose.

I've been very pleased with both of these models in various capacities, from Other World Computing (OWC):

OWC Mercury On-The-Go Pro..........................OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro™

 

[marzer]

Hey guys,

Need some ideas on external storage and backup.

I'm planning to buy a Macbook Air to replace my aging Macbook but the tiny SSD drive will be too small to store my lossless music collection and HD movies (currently around 500GB but will certainly grow over the 4-5 years I intend to use the machine; in this time, 1-2 TB would be a reasonable guess) so I'll need an External HD to store my files.

I also need to backup: I'd like frequent backups to be made of the internal SSD drive but the media library only needs to be protected from accidental deletion/drive failure: there's no need for incremental backups.

The natural solution is to get two disks: one backup disk (media and internal SSD so bigger than media alone) and one for my media library but I want to preserve desk space as much as possible. With two external HD's, I'm going to have a lot of cables, power supplies and (potentially) noise and ugliness. It'd be nice to avoid this as far as possible. Is there a nice enclosure that could house two disks of different sizes? Something that looks like an Iomega UltraMax or a Lacie Little Big Disk would look great on my desk. NAS, maybe? Stick everything on a big RAID disk (including internal Time Machine Backups, which will be small by comparison to my media collection so this isn't massively inefficient) with mirroring? Of course, this won't save me from accidentally deleting my media...

Cheaper is better, upgradable is also good but quality and reliability ultimately win.

I'm not currently interested in streaming (yet): I listen to my audio through a high quality DAC and headphones and I watch movies on my Mac.

Thanks.

I had the same concerns for clutter and space as you. That's why I went with this:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Mercury-EliteAL-Pro-RAID

Two hard drives in one enclosure. You can config them as two separate disks. I have 2x2TB drives in mine, one holds my media library and the other one holds my backups. I use Chronosync to perform scheduled, weekly backs from the one disk to the other.

And if you connect it to a router you can access it remotely. Mine's connected to a mac mini I use as an iTunes server.