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December 15th, 2008 5:24 am
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One reason I say NEW(ish) is because I’ve been having this system in place for some time now, but I’ve just caught up with things that I’m finally able to actually make a post about it. I won’t get into crazy detail, but I will give you the general idea. I had previously done a post on archiving and backing up all of my data, but I didn’t have a solution for all of my photography because of pricing and space issues. Now I have something in place that I can easily grow on and it works pretty seamlessly.
I am going to be the first to admit that I definitely didn’t come up with this idea on my own. Doing research for a long time took me to the blog of Image Mechanics. They did a post on their archiving system and I figured it would be perfect for me. I basically am running the exact same system with only a few minor changes to suit my needs so I won’t get into a mile of details.
Backup In a nutshell: I currently run a RAID 10 on two separate Sonnet 5 bay cases. I chose Sonnet because I was able to find a great system that allowed me to use only one eSATA cable per case and I could choose my own drives. Each Sonnet case has can hold up to 5 1Tb Drives. One case has 2 1Tb drives which are striped (data spanned across the drives) and each case have the same 2 1Tb drives which are mirrored. Basically all of my data is written and backed up on an additional set simultaneously. If you don’t have one you will need a RAID card for your computer to be able to do this. I also have an additional set of 2 1Tb drives that I keep off site and back up once a week. I use Retrospect to back up weekly. This ensures that if I have a fire in the studio I’m only out a week at most. I’ll probably move to a 3Tb system of working files, but I’m trying to keep it as small as possible and just archive frequently.
Now for archiving… Mimicking the system I recently stumbled upon: I have a 2 bay Sans Digital case which allows me to set up a RAID internally. The case is hooked up eSATA and old data is copied to two drives which are RAID1. The case also allows me to insert drives without attaching any sort of mount so it is a quick and easy in-and-out. Data is written simultaneously (mirrored) to each drive. I label each drive with the same number adding an A or B and I keep the A drives on site and I keep the B drives off site at my house. I currently archive to 250gb hard drives to span out my data. In the event that drives in the same set are corrupt I don’t loose 1TB of data I would just loose 250gb. Don’t get me wrong… Either would suck, but it’s what I do. Not sure if the 250gb system is as cost effective as the 1Tb drives, but projects are anywhere from 15-35gb so 1Tb archives would probably be overkill anyway.
Once my drives are written I eject them and put one in a case in the studio and take the other drive home to put in a separate case for offsite archive. The cases I use are the Pelican 1520 series. I can hold 16 hard drives in each case. Each case was custom formatted for my drives and the inserts are made of anti static foam which is cut to the drive size. The cases are also water tight and crush proof. I ordered the cases through Cpd Industries which actually cut the foam and all. The website looked a bit sketchy, so I called and placed my order, but everything was legit and came in very quick!
You may ask “Why Hard Drives?”. I was archiving with archival grade DVDs (which weren’t cheep to begin with). I’d burn 2 copies of each project. One was kept in the studio and the other was kept at home. Doing design and photography I am typically asked to rework old projects, reference them, or pull old images for new projects. If the files were archived I have to thumb through tons of DVDs not to mention the data was typically spanned across anywhere from 4-8 DVDs (for archiving you would actually double that number: I was actually burning 8-16 DVDs total). If the data was spanned and I needed all or a specific file that was written on both I had to restore every DVD. Now… I keep a text file on my computer which is searchable. I search for the project title and it shows me which drive it is on. I then pull only that drive, mount it, and it is as if it never left my computer. I pull what I need and I’m good to go!
So that’s it in a nutshell: Good thing I wanted to be brief ;)
Bond. Jamie Bond.
Why not just go with 4TB in a Drobo? They can eventually hold up to 16TB of data when the 4TB drives finally come around. If a drive dies, just take that one out and pickup whatever is on sale at Office Depot that week.
http://www.datarobotics.com/
http://www.drobo.com/Products/CS_photography.html
I have several friends who purchased one and love it!
I would have to second Adam’s suggestion. You are loosing a lot with the RAID 1. The Drobo is an excellent storage device. NTFS you are limited to 2TB. OSX will give you up to 16TB as the drive technology progresses. It is a very portable box if you have to leave quickly.
Thanks for the comments guys!
Let me first start off by saying that I’m not much on the techie end of things as far as my knowledge goes with RAID and what not. I leave that business up to my buddy Daniel @ crucedesign.com to advise me ;).
I do recall a few things that made us choose what we did. Blog post is titled “New(ish)”… When we actually put this system in play the drobo was one of the first systems we looked at. However, the drobo (at that time) was only usb 2.0 and that was our biggest turn off. For a working file system that was going to be wayyy too slow. I also had a big concern about it being a proprietary system. If i had issues and i needed support I would need to deal specifically with drobo. It also wasn’t great for the redundancy I was looking for. Now i have 2 on site backups and one offsite.
I do use the cases I have now for other drive storage as well so the extra space is nice.
Also, I don’t plan on going over 2TB of working data any time soon, and I am aware that if I do I will need to set up my system a bit differently. I can expand by having a multiple drive setup as opposed to one big volume drive.
am i making any sense? I’d love to hear your thoughts..
Maybe Daniel can join us in this thread and shed a bit more light on his thoughts!
Your setup does make sense, and if it’s working out for you, so much the better!
The way I would have perhaps gone, is getting two Drobos and use a tool like rsync, or some other data syncing tool to keep the drobos in sync with each other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync
There are many versions of rsync for windows as well as OSX and Unix/Linux.
(or if you have droboshare, rsync server can run right on the box itself! http://tinyurl.com/6j6ayl )
What you do is keep one Drobo offsite, and keep the other onsite. Then once a week or so, bring the other one in and rsync them (or if you have the bandwidth, do it remotely). Kris can probably add a bit more to that end, since he has a drobo and has had the chance to mess around with it more than I have.
There are quite a few people it would seem that are using rsync with their Drobos
http://tinyurl.com/65wmzc
Also, there are Droboapps now that greatly extend the features of these units!
http://www.drobo.com/droboapps/
One big problem I had with Drobo was it cost some serious bones just for the case. You are looking at $1000 just for two empty cases. Then if you add say 8 1TB drives you are looking at another $1000-$1200. With 4 1TB drives in each you only get a usable space of 2.7TB. So Drobo total solution for 2.7TB of storage with failsafe and redundancy would cost $2200. The other solution with a possible of 4TB usable and still providing offsite backup only costs around $1500.
It is also an issue considering that Drobo was only USB 2.0 at the time of intial setup. This solution is ESATA so the working speed is equivalent to that of an internal drive. As well you do have the option to use the drives in RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 or JBOD. Drobo is pretty much RAID 5 and that’s it. You also can still add up to two more cases and the RAID card can still support the multiple drives with out performance decrease. Drobo is FW800 so the more cases you put on the Firewire Bus the decrease in speed you experience. Unless you add Firewire 800 cards internally. the RAID card is really the crux of the whole solution. It is a HighPoint RocketRAID card. Very solid.
Don’t get me wrong…Drobo is slick. I would love to have one simply for the ability to mix and match drives. It is just a pretty closed box solution that doesn’t give you the future ability to grow into an enterprise type level solution.
I do have to say though that as a possible offsite remote backup solution it could be useful with DroboShare. But if you are changing chunks of data in excess of 5GB in a couple of days your bandwidth needs to rsync something like that could be HUGE!
Also a note…for those of you using FW800 on a PC….
http://www.drobo.com/Products/FAQs.php#9
Very interesting post about the FW800 on a PC. I will definitely keep that in mind for the future.