Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

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> Occurs to me you might wonder what this looks like today

I finally hit a sweet spot of performance, archive accessibility, and offsite safety, by using internal SSD for latest import workspace, direct attached WD Velociraptor (Thunderbolt) for current projects (can reconnect between Mac Mini server and laptops as needed), and 2 direct attached LaCie 4big Quadras (daisy chained via FW800) for archived projects (up to 32 TB).

Interestingly, because these are all direct attached, BackBlaze will happily back them up offsite at ridiculously low cost if that's your thing. Initial backup of several terabytes will take several months, though.

For fast cheap offsite backups, partner with a colleague with similar storage needs who uses the same ISP via the same head end. Just backup to each other. You can enjoy near LAN latencies at maxed out link speeds. This trick will save you both time and headaches.

Finally consider a product like the CyberPower OR2220PFCRT2U (this one also blends nicely in an AV cabinet) to keep an Airport Extreme and Mac Mini along with all that storage running for about 80 minutes of power outage.

The idea of partnering w/ someone using the same ISP is interesting. It's really offsite that's the whole challenge. If it takes three days to get 60g uploaded (setting aside the nuisance of saturating our bandwidth for doing things like making Skype calls), then I effectively have close to no solution.. because during a busy season I have at least one job exposed for half of most weeks. House burns down, and I lose recent work.. which is the most important work since it hasn't been delivered.

Really, I need something that gets a copy of the images away from my home within a day to have something I'd be comfortable with.

Sounds like you need something based on mailing drives.

Or Google Fiber!!

Really, I think it makes sense for someone to prepare for the future and assume this will be feasible for upload in the not-crazy future.. unless more hobbyists keep deciding we need exponentially larger RAW files.. It's a crazy race :|

Would it be feasible to simply dupe the drive and find a secure off-site place within driving distance to store it or a storage machine, and then mail drives to glacier (Amazon will import a HDD via mail for around 100USD) as the storage machine fills?

effectively this is already what I do, except that you added a step of sending the data to AZN which doesn't help me any if the data is already offsite. Once I've driven somewhere, we're done.

I worked at a wedding photography/videography place a few years ago and we did a lower tech version of this. The owner had a storage array at the office and at home, and he'd cart an external back and forth daily. This way there were two copies of all work, and three of the most recent: one at the office, one at his home, and the most recent work (that which hasn't been delivered) on the portable drive.

I think your strategy has a huge flaw -

The Joplin, Missouri tornado, Moore, Oklahoma tornado, Hurricane Sandy and Katrina.

I don't think you should rely on someone who MERELY uses the same ISP. I think you need to be a thousand miles away from each other.

Until Backblaze changes their policy for direct attached storage, I'm covered as they have all my RAWs.

I also store full "originals" (JPEG only, not RAW, but at least its something) on an unlimited Pro Flickr account, again, until their policy changes.

If you're using a newer MacBook Pro I've seen some people swap out the disk drive bay for a 2nd SSD. This doesn't sound like much but that allows them to run a RAID 1 setup on their laptop (1 drive with a mirrored second drive).

These guys talk about doing that with a RAID 0 setup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaXZVHcdGM

I import from cameras to a couple NEXTODIs on the road, then from the NEXTODI to the SSD. I don't delete from the NEXTODIs until images are all the way through to offsite backup. The SSD is not RAID, and worse, the Velociraptor runs in RAID0 for raw (pardon the pun) throughput, but I always have at least two copies on diverse systems.

I used to do that, albeit RAID 0. :) best $1200 I ever spent on 160GB hah. http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-raid-0-arr...

The idea of a P2P backup solution is interesting, more so if you can hook up strangers into a massive backup network.

Of course, the challenge is to make sure the peers are online when you need the files, and for this reason the network may need 5-10gb of storage for 1gb of data to duplicate the content across multiple users.

Wuala tried to do that, but I think they have since switched to a centralized solution.

The difficulty is ensuring enough clients have a copy of the file that it won't disappear, especially with people connecting and disconnecting a lot.

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