Drobo Storage array yay? Or nay?
- Thread starter dmnEPC
- Start date
This. It's nice to have all data I care about easily downloadable in a short period of time / able to be stored on a usb stick.
It all depends on what you do. If all you have are a few websites and text docs to worry about, then a 10gb Dropbox will suit you.
I have almost 200gb of stock photography, 110gb of photos I've taken, 20gb of vector files, 4gb of fonts, 50gb of sound files and samples, 10gb of books, the music collection is 700gb, etc. My mailing lists are 12.9gb alone. My own Outlook pst file is nearly 7 gb (admittedly I do need to purge the email in there). I can go on but I won't bore you.
I will most likely buy a Qnap NAS and not a Drobo though. Something like the 469 Pro... QNAP Systems, Inc. - Network Attached Storage (NAS) - Products - Products - Storage and put 4 x 3tb drives in it in a RAID for 6tb of storage.
I have almost 200gb of stock photography, 110gb of photos I've taken, 20gb of vector files, 4gb of fonts, 50gb of sound files and samples, 10gb of books, the music collection is 700gb, etc. My mailing lists are 12.9gb alone. My own Outlook pst file is nearly 7 gb (admittedly I do need to purge the email in there). I can go on but I won't bore you.
I will most likely buy a Qnap NAS and not a Drobo though. Something like the 469 Pro... QNAP Systems, Inc. - Network Attached Storage (NAS) - Products - Products - Storage and put 4 x 3tb drives in it in a RAID for 6tb of storage.
As with all storage solutions, you aren't truly safe unless any physically local storage is also mirrored virtually somewhere else. So get backblaze or something to also backup remotely.
Raid arrays don't mean shit when your house burns down, backups need to be physically spread out.
Raid arrays don't mean shit when your house burns down, backups need to be physically spread out.
this and this
even datacenters back up their datacenters
but
as far as the drobo it does look pretty bad ass
I got two 1TB drives on my server and I'm getting ready to do some storage and backup on it. Just found this free self hosted solution that I'm getting ready to try called AjaXplorer - looks pretty sweet and has an Android client too.
I bought the original Drobo Gen 1 model. It was cool but pretty slow and expensive. Also it took forever to rebuild when I swapped a drive. Oh and the dumbest thing was that if you got to 90% usage, it would throttle you down to retarded slow. So, it took forever to delete shit to get back under 90%. I don't know how they are now, but you are probably better off with a raid NAS or just an online backup service.
Buying or building your own storage is useful but like others have mentioned, you still want an offsite backup. I don't care what raid you use, 5,6,10, hardware fails and a fire/flood/thief doesn't offer total protection. You can save yourself a ton of money by just buying a simple JBOD storage device (non-raid) and use a 3rd party service like crashplan.com. Nothing against NAS but if it's simple storage you need don't drop a ton $ on something you really don't need.
If you do decide you want drobo or something else, check out smallnetbuilder.com and read thru the NAS reviews.
If you do decide you want drobo or something else, check out smallnetbuilder.com and read thru the NAS reviews.
Amazon Clouddrive + Goodsync = Win
Amazon's Clouddrive is less expensive than most other external backups out there and easier to use. I've got Dropbox, SOS Online Backup, and Amazon. Dropbox is great for sharing with coworkers quickly. SOS Online Backup I've found to be a waste of money. Backups are fine, but I can not get anything downloaded from there larger than a single file. Amazon is my favorite for the big stuff. It just works well, and is about half the price of Dropbox. If DB was the same price as Amazon, I'd probably use it exclusively.
Amazon's Clouddrive is less expensive than most other external backups out there and easier to use. I've got Dropbox, SOS Online Backup, and Amazon. Dropbox is great for sharing with coworkers quickly. SOS Online Backup I've found to be a waste of money. Backups are fine, but I can not get anything downloaded from there larger than a single file. Amazon is my favorite for the big stuff. It just works well, and is about half the price of Dropbox. If DB was the same price as Amazon, I'd probably use it exclusively.
I have a qnap 419p+ and it's awesome. I back the critical stuff from there up to a freenas box I have that's in another part of my house (garage). It totals around 800gb and is mostly photos and family videos with another 3tb of downloaded movies that don't get backed up, I have digital photos stored back to 1998.
The online services that offer over 500gb are way too expensive IMO, I think it was somewhere around $1500 (or was it $2500?) per year for 1TB on Amazon S3.
edit: Just checked, prices have come down a bit but it's still $1200/yr
The online services that offer over 500gb are way too expensive IMO, I think it was somewhere around $1500 (or was it $2500?) per year for 1TB on Amazon S3.
edit: Just checked, prices have come down a bit but it's still $1200/yr
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again though, whats your plan when the house burns down while on vacation? offsite backups aren't optional, if your backup strategy doesn't include offsite backups then you don't have a backup strategy.
Instead of just chastising everyone for their lack of planning, why not make a suggestion where we can all get 2 to 4 tb of offsite storage for a reasonable cost.
And then tell me how I'm going to get all that data to the offsite storage point at less than 1mb a second.
Well, the ultimate is to move the freenas box to my girlfriends house and do nightly updates over a vpn via rsync but I haven't decided if I want her having physical access to all my data (she's very sneaky, I own exgf pics plus it's a full tower case and a bit of an imposition on her small house).
Then there's the tried and true copy everything to a 1TB drive and leave it at a friends house in a fireproof safe. I do this as well, but I haven't refreshed that backup in probably 6-9 months.
I suggested Backblaze earlier which is $5/month for unlimited data and they can mail you a flash drive with all of your data on it:
Plus, spending an extra $XXX-$XXXX for an additional backup system that will be stored in the same physical location is pointless for aforementioned reasons, so you should be spending that amount of coin on a good remote backup source.
Hmmm... thinking about it, I don't have a single thing on my local PC that needs to be backed up. I could throw this laptop into the bathtub right now, wouldn't have to worry about reverting to any backups, and wouldn't lose a single minute of work. I guess I'd lose my Outlook PST file, but that's hardly the end of the world for me, because even then, incoming / outgoing e-mails are automatically archived on the server. I definitely have backups in place, but it's all server-to-server.
You guys are doing this shit wrong... how do you expect to scale with so much stuff sitting on your local PC?
You guys are doing this shit wrong... how do you expect to scale with so much stuff sitting on your local PC?
I suggested Backblaze earlier which is $5/month for unlimited data and they can mail you a flash drive with all of your data on it:
Plus, spending an extra $XXX-$XXXX for an additional backup system that will be stored in the same physical location is pointless for aforementioned reasons, so you should be spending that amount of coin on a good remote backup source.
I'll definitely check out Backblaze, but the problem of slow upload is still there. It would take me months to upload everything. Having redundant storage locally isn't pointless however. Most people have one hard drive in their one computer and do sweet fuck all to back up their stuff. The first step in any backup scheme is hardware redundancy. The second step is offsite backup which I have to some degree with my dedi.
In the meantime I'm confident in knowing Spanish brick and concrete houses don't burn easily and I live on high ground. I live in a gated community and I have bars on all my windows. I also have a big black dog that makes most Spaniards piss themselves in fear when they see her. Plus I rarely ever leave the house, so meh.