Need help with storage and backup strategy

I am undergoing a project to put all of my DVD library (~700 disks) into iTunes so I can stream them to my Apple TVs and put some on my iPad when I travel for work, etc. I think this is around 1.5TB right now

In addition, I am an "advance amateur" photographer and have tens of thousands of photographs consuming many GBs (thought not nearly as much as the movies). I actually don't have an exact idea, this is somewhere between 60GB and 200GB.

I consider the photographs to be absolutely mission critical. I CAN NOT lose them. I would be absolutely devastated. I consider the movies to be a very close second. I could reproduce the content frankly but there are HUNDREDS of hours of work into ripping and encoding them.

I have two problems.
1) In general, I am running out of storage. I currently have a 3TB Seagate FW800 drive and have used 2TB of it. The last TB will last me a while, but not super long and I want have a plan in place before I'm completely full.

2) I am in even worse shape for backups. My backup drive is only 2TB. So basically between the photos, movies, and my iMac system backup, my drive is full and can't even complete a backup right now.

I signed up for crashplan and started a backup. Its telling me I have nearly 50 days remaining which sounds about right. I could let this keep going or I could pay $125 and seed the backup.

If I relied solely on crashplan as my offsite backup, this would ALSO free up my additional 2TB drives for local storage (I actually have 2 because I currently rotate my backups offsite). But it means I don't have full control of my backups which worries me a little, though not overly.

My other thought is to get a 4-5 bay NAS. But I'm worried about this because if I finish the Crashplan backup and them get a NAS, is Crashplan going to recognize it as the same data or is it going to make me re-backup 1.6TB AGAIN???

Additional thoughts:
1) I'm mildly concerned if I let the crashplan backup finish online that my ISP will shut me off eventually.
2) Crashplan says they send a 1.5TB drive for your seed, which wouldn't even cover all of my data.
3) As my data grows, if I continue with the crashplan option, I could have 4TB, 5, 6, who knows. Are there going to be significant additional fees from crashplan if I have to do a mail-me-a-hard-drive restore of 6TB???

 

I thought about that but that could easily be well over $2000. Maybe even $3000.

 

Yes. I'm also an IT professional and if your data is in the same place its a copy, NOT a backup. If you don't want to potentially lose it it needs to be physically separated. But I'm just talking about taking a drive to my office. Its not like I'm sending tapes to Iron Mountain.

When you say replicate to externals, what are you suggesting? If I had 4TB of data, what external drive will hold a copy of that?

 

Yeah, the root problem is I need a scalable main storage AND backup. So if I did a NAS/DAS I feel like I would need two units (main and backup) and THREE sets of drives (main and then two sets for the backups so I can rotate).

 

I ended up coming up with a plan. All I really needed was to bounce some things off other people so I appreciate all the input.

For my primary storage I got a Drobo S. I decided I didn't need a NAS and everything that would go along managing that. I've always had my main PC acting as a server for other computers and media devices (Apple TVs, etc.) in the house forever. So I knew that was a setup I could easily manage. I also did have to evaluate what I could live with from a data redundancy perspective. Basically (to be IT nerdy) I had to sit down and develop my requirements.

I also decided that as long as I didn't buy something that was not at all scalable or made the situation more complex (like having 4 external drives hooked up at all times etc.) that I didn't need to solve the whole problem all at once.

So now my situation looks like this. I am backing up to Crashplan so that will serve as my catastrophic event backup which hopefully I'll never have to use as it will be expensive to restore from. If I have to I'll pay up, gladly, but I won't be restoring over the internet. I've got my primary storage on the Drobo which is expandable. I'm backing up via Time Machine to what USED TO BE my primary storage which for now is a big enough backup. If that gets to be too small, I'd actually consider a backup Drobo. But I can keep costs in check by not needing to rotate my backup off-site since I have a catastrophic backup plan.

 

I just wanted to drop in and give an update in case people search on this thread in the future. I bought the Drobo S and migrated my data over. I have (3) 2TB drives installed in it giving me 3.57TB total with single drive failure protection enabled. I decided to go with CrashPlan as my catastrophic failure backup and will continue to backup locally as long as hard drive sizes permit, just to have a local copy to restore from. Once my media library gets too big I'll rely on just the cloud storage (CrashPlan) and I'll do local backups of only my digital photos and system image. That should last me for years as the bulk of my data is my iTunes library.

As far as the Drobo, the ONLY negative comment I have at all is I wish Drobo had a way to show actual capacity in the native OS (i.e. in Finder and Windows Explorer). Instead you have to setup a volume size when you initialize the device and can't change it after that without formatting. So in Finder it shows that I've used 1.8TB of 16TB right now because I set up the volume as the MAXIMUM size. Otherwise if you set it to something smaller (say 4TB) when you go over that, it creates a new volume. I didn't want 5 different volumes or whatever it might end up being so I formatted it to the maximum supported size for the time being.

Speed seems to be just fine, I didn't benchmark because I don't care as long as it meets my real-world use needs, which it does.