Backups are more important than you think
I’ve been in this industry for 28 years now. However, it was only in the last eight years that I knuckled down and built a backup solution a.k.a. a NAS RAID array.
Why?
Because of pics!
With three kids, we were starting to take LOTS of pictures. Smart phones make it doubly easy to capture photos. And I began to worry, “What happens if I lost them all??”
So I shopped around, bought a 4-bay Synology RAID chassis, and grabbed a pair of NAS-grade 8 TB drives. Loaded ’em up and got the thing running.
TIP: Do NOT go cheap here! Yes, you can DIY the heck out of it, but the idea is to buy something that already has everything you need and you USE it, not PLAY with it.
The whole thing-a-ma-bob cost me about $700. Gulp. That was a bit of coin to drop on something that I knew in the back of my mind was needed, but felt like a background device I wouldn’t see much of.
Wrong!
I discovered that I had bought a SUPREME RAID device! Synology is loaded TO THE HILT with stellar software!
First off, it operates as a backup drive as expected. But it comes with additional features:
- Carve out various partitions as needed. We have one partition set aside for my machine and for the Mrs’s machine. After installing Carbon Copy Cloner, we have nightly incremental backups.
- There is a whole SEPARATE partition where I house all the raw footage, sound clips, and grab bag of audio/video bits and pieces along with the project file every single YouTube video I ever made. I can grab a given project, pull it onto my local machine, and open it up with Final Cut Pro in no time flat.
- Ever used Dropbox? It has a software package you can install that runs the same way — a folder that syncs. The only limitation is how much of a partition you want to carve out. Ours is 20 GB, 10x the free plan of Dropbox. No subscription fee!
But that isn’t the only thing. RAID arrays have to be expandable. That’s why I bought a 4-bay unit. I have two drives in there right now. But at any time I can add another drive.
Now there are wrinkles in traditional RAID, in that if you don’t build it with identical drives, some disk space is simply thrown away. For example, if you bought a pair of 8 TB drives and wanted to install a 12 TB drive to expand into RAID 5, that extra 4 TB is basically unavailable.
Imagine buying a jumbo drive and sacrificing 1/3 of it!!
Synology has something to deal with that called SHR-1. It’s an extension of the RAID protocol. It essentially will cut up disk drives into smaller fragments in order to better leverage the space.