Help with attached storage in two locations

[lylefk]

Aloha,

I'm hoping for some advice here. I am hoping to have attached storage (I believe direct is preferred for speed?) in two locations that automatically sync with one another. I have a 2015 5k iMac in one location and a new iMac Pro in the other. I am a professional photographer and would like to be able to work in one location and pick it up on the other as well as have all of my images and documents backed up in two locations for security. Preferably without too much fiddling. Right now, I am just going back and forth with a external drive with files I'm working on, but invariably the files I need are in the other location. Guessing I'll be looking at 5 to 8 bay enclosures.

Have been pointed to a RAID 5 setup. He suggested Drobo but I'm unsure about the service if something were to go wrong, and I don't see a clear cut solution for the data syncing.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated! Need it to be reliable of course, speed is important with the ability to hopefully work directly on the drive in Lightroom and Photoshop without much bogging down.

Thanks!

 

[HDFan]

I am hoping to have attached storage (I believe direct is preferred for speed?)

Have been pointed to a RAID 5 setup. He suggested Drobo

How did you plan to transfer to the external disk drives if they are directly attached? If you use 2 NAS enclosures on a network you could simply Carbon Copy Clone one drive to the next as needed.

Direct can be faster, but a number of NAS drives now support 10 GB ethernet. The initial load can take some time, but since subsequent copies are incremental they tend to be fast.

Drobo has some great features, among them the ability to use disks of different sizes. Since it is software RAID it tends to be slower than a hardware based RAID. A 4 bay RAID 5 QNAP TS-453BT3 on a 10 GB network I see 227/576 MB/s write/read, but actual speeds tend to be lower than that.

RAID setup is a tradeoff between protection, speed and disk capacity. The more disk failures you want to be able to tolerate (1, 2 ... ) the lower the capacity and in many cases the lower the speed.

 

[wardie]

RAID5 may help you manage each local physical enclosure’s performance (via striping across disks) and disk hardware redundancy (using parity information, so any one disk can die and be replaced without loss). But its got nothing to do with synchronising your data across multiple locations via t’internet.

You’ll need a separate solution for that - either some setup you manage yourself with a synchronisation software and direct connection between the two over the net (e.g. chronosync), or easier but more costly at scale to just use a cloud-based file service (e.g. dropbox etc) and maintain two local instances of the cloud storage, one on each enclosure. That way you have a third cloud backup too, all sync’ing taken care of automatically. Guessing you are talking 10’s TBs?

 

[deanlute]

Have a look at resilio sync

 

[lylefk]

Chronosync seems like it might be a good solution, thanks for that. Resilio seems close but not quite what I need.

Seems like a two part solution, the hardware side and a software solution for the synchronizing.

Thanks!

 

[Dash Tesla]

If you care about your data do get something better than RAID, I don't even know how in 2019 people can have discussions about RAID and not ZFS/BTRFS, if you're gonna get a pre-built solution do make sure it supports BTRFS/ZFS and has active data scrubbing otherwise data corruption can potentially be a problem down the line.

Also do take a look at freenas and the used server market, plenty of better solutions if you really need something reliable and long-term, also look at tape backups for offsite storage and archive (used stuff LTO-5 is quite affordable and cost-effective).

 

[apolkowski]

Why don't you want to sync via cloud services like onedrive? I have two locations where I map folders on fast SSDs to the same OneDrive account.

 

[badgerbadgerx2]

Same question on cloud storage -- such as dropbox. Would seem ideal?

Technically that would mean its in 3 locations... triple redundancy.

How much storage are we talking?