Network Storage Advice Needed!

[Sam Hodgson]

Hello fellow mac users:

I'm hoping someone can give me some advice regarding the most appropriate data storage solution for our organisation.

I work in a small charity office with a core of 4 macbook/pro laptops and 2-3 guest macbook & pc users. We have a 2TB timecapsule which we use for backup of the core team machines. This all works fine.

The core team macbook harddrives are now all full as this is where we store all of our photos/movie clips/docments etc. What we'd like to be able to do is step up a hard drive on the network so that we can off load all the big data files from our macbooks, but retain live access to them. Most important is a large iphoto library which is indexed and labelled in detail. We'd like to be able to move all these photos onto the network hardrive but still access and work with them through our macbooks iphoto applications as we do now.

How can we do this? Can we do this with the existing Time Capsule or do we need to buy a NAS box?

Any advice would be much appreciated as i'm not very clued up in this area. Many thanks

Sam

 

[Lance-AR]

You don't want to store it on the TC as it would put your storage on the same drive as your backup and you would lose both when the drive died.

 

[drsox]

Buy a NAS box with at least 2 RAIDed drives. Then you will have some resilience to a single drive failing. You will also need a backup (I suggest an off-line USB drive) that is refreshed once a week (say).

If you want to consolidate, then many brands of NAS will also run Time Capsule, so the stand-alone Time Capsule can be eliminated when you out-grow it.