Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Advice on storage and back up

S

Stephen Mulhearn

Member
Joined
Feb 2, 2012
Messages
12
Reaction score
0
Points
0
Hi Guys
I am near capacity on my internal hard drives and external back up drives on my Mac pro. I am considering the G speed Q 12 TB RAID 5 system? Any advice about if is the best choice would be much appreciated.
Stephen, based in bonny Scotland!
 
I am coming to the same issue. I'm not sure you would get the kind of speed you want from a raid 5 from an external drive bay, I think that now, if not already, a large drive bay with thunderbolt should be coming out. In my opinion I would just get a smaller cheaper drive to put your overflow on to and then wait for a drive hub that has thunderbolt ability.

This year with the acquisition of the Scarlet I find myself burning through drives faster than ever. My current setup is I have a 256 SSD boot/programs drive, then two 1TB drives in a raid 1 for my current projects, then two 3tb raid 1 drives as archive. Plus a few stand alone drives and an external drive bay. Just waiting for some thunderbolt of NAS system with some speed so it will be feasable for atleast a year or two.
 
Stephen,

Hopefully I'm preaching to the converted here but, whatever you end up doing... off-site backups!

Doesn't matter how secure you think your data is, if it's all in the one place it's vulnerable to everything from fire and flood, to theft and seizure under process of law! I use a three-level backup system (apart from basic redundancy in data storage: a local copy near my desk, a near-site copy within easy range but not in the same building, and an emergency overseas backup at a frequently-visited location which gets updated every time I visit; every couple of months or so at worst.

And it goes without saying, unless you're happy to see your work (and more importantly, things which may well be proprietary or secret to your clients) stolen and exposed, encrypt *everything* properly.

I'm amazed how many so-called professionals are lax about such basic good data-handling practices.

Mike (Scot by birth, New Yorker these days!)
 
*sign*
Multiple backups on different media and multiple geographic locations are a must for important data, encryption too.
One external RAID5-system is good storage to work with, but i wouldn't say this is a save backup-location if its the one and only place where your files get stored.

Really, be paranoid when you think about your data!
 
Stephen Mulhearn said:
Hi Guys
I am near capacity on my internal hard drives and external back up drives on my Mac pro. I am considering the G speed Q 12 TB RAID 5 system? Any advice about if is the best choice would be much appreciated.
Stephen, based in bonny Scotland!
Click to expand...

Stephen

doing this exact process now. Fancy a coffee to talk through options? Where in Scitland are you? Glasgow here.

DM me and let's discuss.

Steve
 
Hey guys
Thank you for the advice. I hear you about multiple back ups. I will not go for my original idea. The G raid 8TB is a good price, i may go for 2 of those, second used for back up. I then need a another plan for off site back up.
Appreciate your input.

Stephen

Hey Steve I am about an hour from Glasgow up in Calander (near Stirling) it would be great to have a chat.
 
Use the homes of family and friends, give to them external harddrives or LTO-tapes, maybe a little storage-server-box/nas which you could synch via internet... Everything is thinkable. Single drives are the most affordable solution, maybe you can make two copys then. But hey, one drive would be still better than nothing. ;)

Three more tips, use encryption software like TrueCrypt and i found protecting my files via par2/par3 against unreadable/corrupted blocks and filesystems very usable (especially when you store something on single drives or optical media), also always generate md5-checksum-files, they're a quick way to check if something is in good state or not.
 
Last edited:
We've been going through some of the same issues with storage. At least for long term back-up LTO-5 seemed like the best option. We've already lost data on spinning drives and needed an alternative. We just purchased a Red net drive from 1 Beyond. We have not yet received it (we just ordered it) but the concept is great and it looks like it's going to cover a few of our needs.

I'll update this post once we get it in and run it a while.

Bob
Water Street Media Works
Scarlet #420
 
Mike 'Fireman' Ross said:
...... and an emergency overseas backup at a frequently-visited location which gets updated every time I visit; every couple of months or so at worst.
(Scot by birth, New Yorker these days!)
Click to expand...

Mike,

If you don't mind me asking...Is this something you are able to do online or is this a physical location that you visit? We've been looking at a 3rd location to store material and all of the "cloud" storage that we've looked at hasn't really appealed to us so far.
 
forget any backup over the internet....you'll spend years uploading and downloading those TB's....not feasible.
My workflow is 4port esata card and four 5 bay hot swappable drives. At moment i have 3 5 bay drive boxes with 3tb drives, and my 4th is all 4tb drives...each is hot swappable and has port multipliers. This i've found is the LEAST expensive for the "bang to buck" ratio. So you can get up to 80TB online storage. And of course backups from those....
 
My setup currently which saves me tons of time is this ... GRAID via ESATA into LaCie ESATA to Thunderbolt hub --> Thunderbolt to MAC. Then I go CARD READERS VIA FIREWIRE 800 into MAC... Very fast... If you can get the ESATA to work on its own do that but some of the ESATA devices aren't compatible yet.
 
Johnny Friday said:
forget any backup over the internet....you'll spend years uploading and downloading those TB's....not feasible.
My workflow is 4port esata card and four 5 bay hot swappable drives. At moment i have 3 5 bay drive boxes with 3tb drives, and my 4th is all 4tb drives...each is hot swappable and has port multipliers. This i've found is the LEAST expensive for the "bang to buck" ratio. So you can get up to 80TB online storage. And of course backups from those....
Click to expand...

Hey Johnny, can you provide a little more in depth explanation of your setup? I'm curious what hardware you're using, and exactly how you've got it configured. Is each bay 5 individual volumes? Are is this a Raid and you swap out 5 drives at once? And how DO you back up?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top