I finally decided to clean up the disk space that is currently distributed on 3 computers and 3 or 4 external drives. I have a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro – and I will use the Pro for performance and as a “home” for my data and software.
The Mac Pro has 4 bays for disks. The two first bays will be for my two 150G WD VelociRaptors (WD3000HLFS — blackplane ready) for my bootable OS, applications and home directory – I will receive these two disk tomorrow morning from newegg. The two other bays will be for 2 1T WD’s caviar black disks and they will host images and other media files AND a photoshop scratch disk. I am considering RAID 0 for these two disks as well, but I am still undecided – maybe it is too risky.
WD's VelociRaptor 150G SATA disk.
A Speedy VelociRaptor
My backup will be a three tier process with (1) Time Machine on a Drobo/DroboShare – nightly backup (2) SuperDuper bootable & Media backup weekly – and cycling two external disks and (3) Off-site/backup. I have three tiers because my main computer will be setup for performance (RAID 0). Drobo uses a proprietary RAID like system and allows for variable size disks that can be replaced as needed. The DroboShare allows the DRobo to be treated as network attached storage (with a gentle hack).
Drobo FW800 & USB 2.0 4 Bay Storage Array with DroboShare
I will use Shirtpocket’s SuperDuper both to make a weekly bootable copy of my OS and apps and a clone of my media & cycle two disks for each (so a total of 4 disks). I got Other World Computing external firewire 800 disks and also also Western Digital My Book Studio disks to accommodate this cycle.
Click here to get an overview of SuperDuper
For offsite, I am seriously torn (and waiting for suggestions here and elsewhere). I have a lot of data, close to the terabyte range – and it will continue to grow at a rate of 200-400GB per year. I would like a place that is both reasonably priced and doesn’t take ‘forever’ to transfer the initial copy, preferable a place that accepts a disk(s) for the initial backup. So far I have looked at, Mozy, Carbonite, Backblaze, Carboncopy and Safecopy. I found this review here via a quick google:
