Seems everyone agrees on plan – data storage on 3 different places – OK. From this jump off, it seems very unclear on path to take. And I can not find a good series that has completed the steps. I guess there are so many options, any effort is better then doing nothing.

Perhaps it is just me, but I have spent a lot of my time trying to find out solution with drobo.

Drobo has confused me though. Many conflicting real world results, now the product has been in the field, both great and horrible.

I bought Drobo, stemming from Fredrick’s and Macbreak peoples gushing over it. But now what? I have been reading recently how important it is to back up your drobo. What? Backing up my back up? Would this mean there needs to be 4 places for data (not just 3)?

I find articles about how to use the Drobo seem to have stopped since early 2009, eccept from resellers. Even the people Macbreak don’t mention drobo anymore – why not? But I hear them embrace NAS solutions.

I hope it is just me, but I find the supporters for drobo kind of faded away.

Thanks, I really have been enjoying your photography blog

is this series going to be continued?
I am just right now looking for backup solutions and would love to hearing your porfessional option about it.
Cheers from good old germany,
a fan of your work

As an aside, I am also rebuilding my iTunes Library, which became corrupted when I tried to dynamically partition my Drobo (DO NOT DO – DOES NOT WORK!) Unfortunately, I didn’t see that it wouldn’t work with iPartition (which does support dynamic partitioning) as it was hidden in the fine print of Drobo release notes. It is very prominently displayed now!

I also think a strategy of redundancy and backup should be used. Drobo provides redundancy, multiple copies of the data in different locations provide backup.

So, right now I back up my main library to a second drive as a vault, to the drobo (copy of the vault) and to the web via BackBlaze. Obviously there are issues with all of these, but I am feeling much better at night, knowing everything exists in different locations!

Long time reader & listener; first time commenter/emailer/questioner…

Question: I’ve been thinking about getting a Drobo to improve my backup strategy. What happens if the Drobo itself has a problem and the hard disks inside it are fine? Can the files be read off the hard disks? Or is the data ‘splattered’ about in some proprietary fashion that will make it impossible to retrieve without another Drobo?

Any clarification would be great.

Thanx

Papa Jorgio

BTW… keep doing what you’re doing. You’re a true talent.

As I try to recover nearly 650gigs of material, and implement an effective backup storage strategy, I look forward to reading more.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks I had for my photography was having too many copies and duplicates everywhere. I don’t like using a backup program because I like to be in control. Perhaps your series will change my mind about this!

My workflow currently is:

take photos and download to laptop from camera
IMMEDIATELY delete all obvious sub-par photos (I never miss them!)
IMMEDIATELY, send originals both to iomega backup drive AND to Flickr (if RAW, run conversion so that jpg’s can be uploaded to Flickr.)

Edit photos at leisure, saving new files to folder on desktop (I create a monthly bucket – I have about 200 photos each month that I decide to keep). Daily, as edits are completed, photos are uploaded to Flickr, new names of course. At end of each month, the monthly desktop folder is copied to the Iomega backup drive. (Remember, all originals are already protected from loss in first step).

This works for me, and will only become a problem when I use up all 500Gb on my iomega (I have used about half of it so far). I am not concerned with permanent storage on my laptop, so I depend on the iomega, the Flickr storage and then my bank safety deposit box for really important stuff).

Thanks. -jb

P.S. I am a big fan of TWIP, but I wish you guys would keep us advanced family photogs in mind during your discussions. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, but you often immediately get into heavy acronyms and assume that your audience is already up to date on new technologies. I think that there is a big bunch of us that just want to make better family and personal pics; we need to know about the new technologies, but the Q&A portion of the show is more valuable.

That is why you should have either two local copies and a third in the cloud or at another physical location (preferably all three although the likely all three would not be 100% in sync). Anyway, based on the description of where you are headed, it sounds to be included, but I wanted to be certain. And I say this because I performed a physical audit previously and found the backup data for a large institution actually sitting on top of the physical box it was supposed to be backing up. So this is not a mistake of only amateurs.

My dream scenario would be to have a system like drobo to ‘work against’ as opposed to just backing up work onto it… can this be done for sub $2000 over firewire 800?