Multiple hard drives, multiple Macs

[cmeirick]

I'm reading this, and I have to tell you that I am personally scratching my head. It's your business, yet you don't want to invest in the tools needed to conduct that business efficiently.

Did I miss something along the way?

Yes. I work for a nonprofit educational project, so probably not the business you are envisioning. We are grant funded and don't have a lot of money to throw around on expenses like these. The work we do on our website and for video materials are all needed but are very "additional expenses" next to the work we do with teachers.

I squeak out what I can, but I won't be going to my boss anytime soon and asking for a huge expense for something that isn't super duper necessary. I'd love to find a solution that improves things, and I appreciate all the advice, but if the price is too high I'll probably just keep doing things the way I do, at least for a while longer.

Thanks all. At the very least, you all have stopped me from possibly buying a cheaper solution that I would have been disappointed with. I may do some more testing with using the iMac the way you all describe.

 

[John Kotches]

It's nice to have a rational discussion

A lot of this is going to boil down to how valuable their time is. Time is quite literally money since this is a business use. Improvements to workflow and potentially increased redundancy could be invaluable depending on how long it takes to recover from a drive failure in the case of attaching drives to the iMac and manually rebuilding from the latest backup (if there is one). Lots of inidividual and small businesses complete skip this, then complain about data loss.

Git is a great tool, how many commits depends on how much granular restore capability they want. It adds up quickly too!