3 x 3tb drive configuration for Photo shooting, back up and then off site back up.

Thesachmo

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Jan 10, 2014
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Hi All

I am looking to set up the most efficient way of getting continually shot photos off a digital camera, into a Mac, and then onto the first 3tb drive.

This is then backed up to a second drive.

From here I need it to be backed up into a third off site drive.

Do I set up the the first and second drives in Raid format on a windows 8 machine and then use offsite storage (eg Amazon ss3, Dropbox or similar).

Or do I use 3 x 3tb external hard drives with USB 3.0 connection and just plug into the Mac.

Is there another better way?

Which hardware is best value in terms of a balance between price and reliability??

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions, I have been racking my brains and forums for the last week on this and can't seem to figure out the best solution.

Sach
 

SixCoreFiend

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Jan 11, 2014
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The first question is what problems you are trying to prevent with your backup. RAID 1 is an appropriate backup if you are trying to ensure you are prepared for a drive failure. It is not a backup if you are concerned with accidental deletion, malware, or other non-hardware related problems. That being said, if you were to have those two drives in RAID 1 (to protect against drive failure) and then do incremental weekly/daily backups to your offsite drive, that would account for most scenarios.

Only caveat to that suggestion is that you need to make sure your offset backup frequency gives you as much time as possible to recognize problems. I have my own backup solution work on weekly increments, because to me losing a weeks worth of content is not the end of the world. For yourself however, I would mirror the backup frequency over however often you would delete the photos from your camera's memory card (the whole point being that if it isn't on the offsite backup yet, at least its on your camera in the event of a non-hardware problem on the RAID.
 

Thesachmo

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Jan 10, 2014
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10,510
Many thanks for your reply.

had a bit more of a look, and crashplan seems to do what i need but in a different logic.

backs up from the mac/pc to cloud, which can then be backed up onto an external HD.

might get everything i need without too much hassle in terms of config of RAID, and maintenance.

though i did like the idea of QNAP TS-420 Turbo NAS 4-bay with Media Server, DLNA streaming, web server, itunes server and RAID but not sure how much value i would get from the itunes/web server.

many thanks again for your help