Haven't had a mac since 2016

[Freemanator3030]

I'm looking for some advice. I bought an iMac in 2013 which I used for 3 or 4 years or so. I remember thoroughly enjoying it and I also used to use a 4-bay drobo for external storage and liked it's simplicity and the way it duplicates the data for redundancy. I had a hard drive fail and I easily swapped it out for another and didn't loose any data.

A few years have passed and have since switched to PC as apple products are more expensive. You know the drill, buying a house etc. Is financially draining and technology takes a backseat.

About a year ago I started a YouTube channel, it's small and I only create content for fun but I've found that my machine is slow using DaVince Resolve and the editing aspect it taking way longer than I'd like and thinking about going back to Mac as I recall FCP just working seamlessly and loved using my drobo.

I've since have found out drobo are no more and I'm tossing up between a MacBook air or iPad pro to replace my laptop.

I prefer the idea of the iPad as I fancy creating some digital art, but I just wonder if anyone is using an iPad/MacBook with a network storage device I can have at home for the bulk of my data. I'd plan to work with video content locally on the machine and then offload footage/finished video to external storage to keep the machines drive as free as possible and it also means I won't have to buy a Mac/iPad with 2tb a drive. As drobo is no more, what is a good alternative that's user friendly and creates a redundant copy of data? I would like to be able to access files remotely if required. Can anyone help/advise?

I'm feeling like I'm a little behind the curve but I don't particularly want to pay ££ per month or iCloud backup. Its annoying the FCP for iPad is a subscription but I will just turn it on/off as and when I have a couple of projects to work on as I create content quote sporadically.

Any advice much appreciated.

 

[9valkyrie]

My MBA does a good job with 4k video editing and encoding/decoding, but I don't have FCP, I use iMovie. I have a NAS with redundancy and it works great for private cloud storage.

 

[ChrisA]

If you liked Drobo, Synology is kind of the same idea but MUCH better and more capable. Look into one of those. Their "plus" series is the one to get. It does quite a lot more than just storing files and can work seamlessly with Mac or IOS.

If you are only using one camera, any current Mac will handle one track of 4K video. More RAM is better but any Mac
You can use Resolve on the Mac for free.

 

[Freemanator3030]

Thanks for the replies, I've since been looking at Synology and wish I'd looked into these sooner!

It feels like a bit of a steep learning curve as I'm learning about connection speeds and looking into the limitations just to ensure it's the right fit for me... liking the look of the BTRFS feature!

 

[Alameda]

Thanks for the replies, I've since been looking at Synology and wish I'd looked into these sooner!

It feels like a bit of a steep learning curve as I'm learning about connection speeds and looking into the limitations just to ensure it's the right fit for me... liking the look of the BTRFS feature!

I switched from Drobo to Synology, as the Drobo was flaky and they stopped supporting the product.

My Drobo was a USB-C model and the Synology is a gigabit Ethernet model. The big difference is that gig Ethernet is very slow. For backup and remote access, it’s fantastic, but it is not a working disk, at least, not for photo and video editing. You can upgrade some Synology models to 2.5 and even 10 gig Ethernet, and add an SSD cache to further speed it up.

There’s a YouTube channel called SpaceRex that’s excellent for Synology. He walks you through set up and settings for all sorts of tasks, he explains security settings and helps you choose which model to buy; all sorts of things.

Now my Synology just hums right along. I don’t even think about it. I put it on a UPS which will trigger a graceful shut down if the power goes out for more than 20 minutes.