
Handling storage and backup as a photographer - herodotus
https://petapixel.com/2019/03/13/how-i-handle-storage-and-backup-as-a-photographer/
======
robjan
This article is basically an advertorial for Drobo

~~~
ekovarski
True but they did at least disclose it, "Full disclosure: Although I have been
using Drobo devices for a number of years, I recently became a Drobo
ambassador"

My experience with Drobo is less stellar.

~~~
oceanghost
Mine too. I've owned, 3 of them... There's no finer way to lose data.

------
atrus
I'm not super well versed in storage stuff, but why is it when I read on
building your own NAS with ZFS I have to use all the same capacity hard drive.
If I have 5x 1tb drives and 1x 4tb I don't have 9tb of storage (minus
replication costs) I have 6tb.

It seems with Drobo, I can throw any different size of drives in, and it just
works. How can I build something like that on my own?

~~~
dsr_
Drobo adds, effectively, a chunking layer. Suppose that all drives are integer
multiples of 1 TB. Split each drive into 1TB volumes, and make mirrors such
that no volume is mirrored to another volume on the same drive. You gain
storage efficiency at the cost of performance and complexity.

In the scenario above you could get 8TB protected by mirroring, or use a Z1,
Z2 or Z3 scheme.

------
Halluxfboy009
Super important if you invest in a raid: get a battery backup for power. I had
a drobo go down on my from a brownout and lost some photos. Now i have battery
backup (and switched to synology) and haven't had any related issues.

~~~
joosters
I've been using Synology NAS devices for some time now and I'd definitely
recommend them too. They have great support, even for their 'budget' systems,
and provide many years of software updates and fixes. Their main web interface
doesn't suck, and they also support SSH and command line management of the
devices too.

I've not invested in backup power, but this is one area that I'm a little
skeptical of... nowadays all filesystems are supposedly advanced (log-
structured records, etc) so in the event of power loss, in 'theory' you should
only be losing at most a few minutes of work, depending upon caching. i.e.
stuff that hasn't yet been written to disk might be toast, but everything else
should be safe. Or can worse corruption still happen?

(quick edit to add: I'm not saying that backups are a waste of time, not at
_all_ , just that I'm questioning having a short battery power-supply backup)

~~~
ekovarski
Corruption can always occur if the moons and sun don't align for you on the
day of the power outage.

Battery backup is usually req'd if you want to use write-caching on your RAID.
You can also use flash backed RAID controllers, it's prolly better than a
battery backup today.

Ultimately, keep things in perspective. The battery backup option might be the
same cost as a decent UPS. You can also always build your own or get a decent
zfs appliance.

