10-07-2022, 02:00 PM
Hi,
I’ve been watching your YT videos with a huge degree of confidence and if you have a dash of spare time, I would like to know your thoughts on my backup conundrum:
I am a photographer using the Canon R3 mirrorless camera and currently have 6Tb of photos plus 4Tb of other stuff on my hard drives. Photos are being added to the drives at around 500Gb to 1Tb per year. I have previously suffered from major hard drive failure in the past so I’m now quite concerned about backups. I know we should have 3 forms of backup: 2 onsite plus one offsite and those onsite should ideally be in different formats. So my setup is:
1. Drobo DAS 5D3 (updated with a Samsung mSATA 250Gb SSD card) with 5x Ironwolf Pro 14Tb in each slot and dual redundancy. It is partitioned with 10Tb resevered for backup and the rest (28Tb) is for data.
2. Synology NAS DS1621+ (updated with 64Gb Kingston ram as per your video, with two Synology 400Gb M.2 NVM cards and with the 10GbE card) set to SHR2 with 12Tb, 12Tb, 16Tb and 16Tb Ironwolf Pro hard drives plus 8Tb Barracuda hard drive. Total actual space is approx 29Tb.
3. 8Tb Ironwolf Barracuda in housed in a powered external enclosure that lives in my laptop bag with just the photos on it. I’m fully aware that this is not an ideal solution but my Amazon Prime account is being closed by Amazon in the near future. I don’t want to pay for an annual cloud subscription as current prices are around £80/2Tb so this would cost me about £2400/decade. I am happy to eventually buy and use single 18Tb drives in an external enclosure that can remain at a relative’s house and be backed up once a month.
The reason for my (eventual) question is that following Drobo’s liquidation, they have written to me stating that the 5D3 will not be compatible with the forthcoming MacOS Ventura upgrade. I do keep my system up-to date where possible but don’t want to never update the system because of the Drobo incompatibility issues so assuming the Drobo will not work when the system is eventually upgraded to Ventura and unless you know otherwise, this will mean writing off the Drobo 5D3! I could sell the Drobo 5D3 but not the drives) on eBay or similar to recover some funds. On the assumption that it’s written off, I’m now in the market for a new drive enclosure. I do like the Drobo because it’s very simple and very fast. I also like the Synology because it’s reasonably fast and I can access it anywhere in the UK/world (so long as I have access to the internet). Both enclosure above have the latest firmware, have dual disk redundancy and both allow me to backup my MacBook Pro (plus the other MBPs in the family) to the DS1621+ and my MBP to the Drobo.
So could you recommend a different drive enclosure, eg, Asustor, Buffalo, D-Link, QNAP, TerraMaster, WD, Zyxel, etc that has 5 or 6 slots and can be DAS or NAS or a newer, better format. I’d be looking to insert the five 3.5” hard drives from the Drobo into the new enclosure giving me around 30Tb of storage space (including dual disk redundancy). I would then copy the files across from the DS1621+ NAS drive. Time to copy the data from the DS1621+ to the new enclosure wouldn’t be an issue but I’d expect it to take a few days. I do like a feature on the TerraMaster NAS drives that allow you to export data using their USB-C and HMDI sockets. The Drobo 5D3 is rather noisy whereas the Synology DS1621+ is considerably quieter. My new unit would be in the living room so needs to be as quiet as possible. The budget for the new enclosure is around £1000. The ideal unit is another DS1621+ or a DS1621XS+ c/w USB-C and HDMI output sockets similar to the TerraMaster but I believe it should be from a different manufacturer. Spec, noise and performance are more important than cost.
Do you have any suggested drives? Feel free to turn this into a YT video for the benefit of other Drobo users!
Regards and many thanks
I’ve been watching your YT videos with a huge degree of confidence and if you have a dash of spare time, I would like to know your thoughts on my backup conundrum:
I am a photographer using the Canon R3 mirrorless camera and currently have 6Tb of photos plus 4Tb of other stuff on my hard drives. Photos are being added to the drives at around 500Gb to 1Tb per year. I have previously suffered from major hard drive failure in the past so I’m now quite concerned about backups. I know we should have 3 forms of backup: 2 onsite plus one offsite and those onsite should ideally be in different formats. So my setup is:
1. Drobo DAS 5D3 (updated with a Samsung mSATA 250Gb SSD card) with 5x Ironwolf Pro 14Tb in each slot and dual redundancy. It is partitioned with 10Tb resevered for backup and the rest (28Tb) is for data.
2. Synology NAS DS1621+ (updated with 64Gb Kingston ram as per your video, with two Synology 400Gb M.2 NVM cards and with the 10GbE card) set to SHR2 with 12Tb, 12Tb, 16Tb and 16Tb Ironwolf Pro hard drives plus 8Tb Barracuda hard drive. Total actual space is approx 29Tb.
3. 8Tb Ironwolf Barracuda in housed in a powered external enclosure that lives in my laptop bag with just the photos on it. I’m fully aware that this is not an ideal solution but my Amazon Prime account is being closed by Amazon in the near future. I don’t want to pay for an annual cloud subscription as current prices are around £80/2Tb so this would cost me about £2400/decade. I am happy to eventually buy and use single 18Tb drives in an external enclosure that can remain at a relative’s house and be backed up once a month.
The reason for my (eventual) question is that following Drobo’s liquidation, they have written to me stating that the 5D3 will not be compatible with the forthcoming MacOS Ventura upgrade. I do keep my system up-to date where possible but don’t want to never update the system because of the Drobo incompatibility issues so assuming the Drobo will not work when the system is eventually upgraded to Ventura and unless you know otherwise, this will mean writing off the Drobo 5D3! I could sell the Drobo 5D3 but not the drives) on eBay or similar to recover some funds. On the assumption that it’s written off, I’m now in the market for a new drive enclosure. I do like the Drobo because it’s very simple and very fast. I also like the Synology because it’s reasonably fast and I can access it anywhere in the UK/world (so long as I have access to the internet). Both enclosure above have the latest firmware, have dual disk redundancy and both allow me to backup my MacBook Pro (plus the other MBPs in the family) to the DS1621+ and my MBP to the Drobo.
So could you recommend a different drive enclosure, eg, Asustor, Buffalo, D-Link, QNAP, TerraMaster, WD, Zyxel, etc that has 5 or 6 slots and can be DAS or NAS or a newer, better format. I’d be looking to insert the five 3.5” hard drives from the Drobo into the new enclosure giving me around 30Tb of storage space (including dual disk redundancy). I would then copy the files across from the DS1621+ NAS drive. Time to copy the data from the DS1621+ to the new enclosure wouldn’t be an issue but I’d expect it to take a few days. I do like a feature on the TerraMaster NAS drives that allow you to export data using their USB-C and HMDI sockets. The Drobo 5D3 is rather noisy whereas the Synology DS1621+ is considerably quieter. My new unit would be in the living room so needs to be as quiet as possible. The budget for the new enclosure is around £1000. The ideal unit is another DS1621+ or a DS1621XS+ c/w USB-C and HDMI output sockets similar to the TerraMaster but I believe it should be from a different manufacturer. Spec, noise and performance are more important than cost.
Do you have any suggested drives? Feel free to turn this into a YT video for the benefit of other Drobo users!
Regards and many thanks
