Backup and Storage Solutions

[Jay Beckman]

Because I'm an incurable digital pack rat, I'm hoping folks might weigh in with ideas for "mass storage" solutions.

Looking for something like a Drobo (but not by Drobo .. conventional wisdom says steer clear) that can support 6-8 Tb worth of drive space.  Doesn't have to be NAS but the need to access an image remotely is always a possibility.  Looked at Net Gear stuff but above 1-2 Tb, they get really pricey, really fast.

Anyone using something or built something they really like?

I've considered adding external drives but my desk already is beginning to look like some kind of hard drive garage sale.   

[jslugman]

I'm in the same boat, my desk looks like a black box breeding ground.

I just saw Carbonite added an external disk (note singular) option with their $99/unlimited data plan so might be part of the backup triad for some.

[Dave S.]

I recently started using Backblaze (an online backup provider).  Prior to picking them, I did a little bit or research (Carbonite, Barracuda, Mozy...), and they seemed to offer the best solution for my needs.  I'm sitting at just about 550 GB of photo files.

[Stephen Marshall]

I don't know if you have the ability to do this, but what I've done is just add internal hard drives to my desktop. All I've added so far is 1TB, but I have the option to add up to 5 extra Hard Drives of any size. Additionally the internal hard drives are generally far cheaper then their external counterparts. It should also be fairly simple to set up remote access to your computer should you want to access it from anywhere.

If you don't already have a desktop, I'm willing to bet you can build one yourself for around $500 with all the capabilities you may need.

[FelipeG]

Jay,

The drobo isn't too bad, but their unconventional way of managing drives means that my 1.5TB drive effectively became a ~700 GB drive and I need to throw in an extra drive to regain some space. The one thing I've read is that if you have a drobo failure, you need another drobo do figure out the data, you can't just use any enclosure to pull the data out of the drives. However, since I bought mine from a friend for like $100 (1st gen that he ended up with after getting it at a surplus sale or something like that), I can't complain much.

Any hard drive is expensive right now thanks to the floods in Thailand. I guess once the supply chain is fully restored and production is running 100% the prices will decrease slightly, but it will be a while. It seems like if you buy any RAID or NAS enclosure and you add the drives it can be less expensive than buying it pre-assembled. The drive I bought for the drobo back in March of last year was $70 on Amazon (should have bought more!) and it's $120 right now (WD Caviar Green 1.5TB)

[Jay Beckman]

Thanks for the feedback Gents...

I've now heard from several quarters that HDD prices have spiked so I'm holding off for now.

Fortunately, Costco still has the occasional good deal on 2TB externals and sometimes even 3TB drives.