Best Storage Solution?

Most probably already debated in several threads (but I cannot find a straight answer), my request for help/advice is about the best possible storage solution for backing up my system and photographs.
Currently, I've got my Aperture 1.5.6 library backed up in the Vault on the second internal 500Gb HD. Is this safe enough or should I really look at an external back-up solution on external HD?
Although my use of the Mac is almost exclusively for photography (not professionally though), I wondering whether I should be thinking of backing up the whole of my system, rather than Aperture only.
In essence, my question is: should I get a massive external HD (1 tera) and back the whole system there (including the Aperture library), or add another couple of internal HD in the free slots of the Pro and back everything up internally? Also, I've read in some posts about RAID. Can someone tell me what this is in very simple words, please?
Any help/advice is welcome as, like it can probably be seen from this post, I am rather confused
Many thanks

Fotoamatore wrote:
Most probably already debated in several threads (but I cannot find a straight answer), my request for help/advice is about the best possible storage solution for backing up my system and photographs.
First we need to know your primary apps and how you take photos (DSLR RAW or point-and-shoot or film/scans) as well as what hard drives you have now and your current backup protocol, both on-site and off-site.
Also, I've read in some posts about RAID. Can someone tell me what this is in very simple words, please?
RAID means redundant array of independent drives, and is not simple and cannot arbitrarily be made simple without missing essential concepts. Basically multiple drives are hardware or software combined in arrays to improve speed and/or data security depending upon each individual scenario. All RAID configurations add cost of some kind: speed, dollars, reliability or capacity; usually a combination of those.
There are many different RAID configurations and what may or may not be appropriate is 100% dependent on each individual setup. Wiki has an excellent white paper on RAID:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID>
Anyone considering RAID should first become fully conversant with all the concepts discussed there. Heavy reading when you get to concepts like atomicity but necessary.
Note that RAID by definition requires multiple drives, so internal RAID configurations are fairly limited. Many vendors offer preconfigured RAID setups that can be connected externally (ideally eSATA, FW800 second choice, USB2 unacceptable). Full conversance with RAID concepts is also necessary prior to purchasing external solutions.
-Allen Wicks

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The original poster asked the question whether or not to have two sets of photos (originals and edited).
What do most people do as far as this is concerned?
Do you include your original files in your Organizer catalogue or not?
The "workflow" that I have finished up with is this:
At the end of each day, I transfer all my camera shots into a folder such as C:\Negs\2006\0605\2006_0521Flowers ("Negs" because I think of them as equivalent to "negatives")
I do not use PSE4 downloader but use Fuji FinePixViewer simply because it came with my first camera and I have just continued with it. It makes it easy to rename the files to things like 0605210001.jpg (last 4 digits sequential for each date). I have tried descriptive file names but found them too difficult.
The word tacked onto the sub-folder name is a reminder of the general nature of the subject matter. I do not worry if there are a few shots that do not really belong but if there are a significant number of shots of totally unrelated subjects, I can cheat and artificially split the sub-folder in two. (The descriptive part of the folder name is pretty much redundant because of PSE4's tagging ability, it is really a carry-over from the Fuji program.)
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Derekeys wrote:
I believe there is a way to have my itunes library on an external, but can the iMac read the external and stream to Apple TV with quality?
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Hi All,
With limited funds when purchasing the new Mac Pro, I'm starting to look at storage for music/pictures/video etc - I'm thinking of storing this data externally and connecting via Thunderbolt or Firewire or USB3 to access the data... Not sure what type of storage to use, upgrading to 1TB PCIe-based flash seems excessive for costs and I would like at least 2TB, anyone have any suggestions?
What are the alternatives for storage... (single disk Raid) I've recently had to replace my internal WD hard drive (lost everything) and the backup time capsule failed, again knackered disk (looks like WD format error with Maverick OS bug), don't want to format them just incase..
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landing page at OWC for Thunderbolt products.
Helios enclosure (the new dual-slot Helios PCIe chassis) and moving various hard drives into Thunderbolt cases (in time) but mainly into my favorite USB3 hard drive enclosure.
For those without eSATA enclosures, a simple eSATA to USB3 adapter might do the trick.
USB3 is plenty fast to house two hard drives.
If you can, I'd try to order with 500GB to get started and have more room for system and default for scratch or even for Aperture/iPhoto or Lightroom.
Always take the precaution and zero a drive before use. Want a solid enterprise ideal for RAID, then look no further than Seagate Constellation series. 128MB cache doesn't hurt and fine for RAID5, NAS or whatever you want.
There should be retail PCIe-SSD products in 2014.
Large storage, http://macperformanceguide.com/topic-thunderbolt.html

Mass HD Video Storage Solutions

I am trying to decide how I should go about choosing a storage solution for large amounts of HD video in a new editing studio we are building.
An xServe is already a definite purchase because we like the scheduling abilities for company resources in iCal, and would also like our Mail in house. That...and we are Mac fans.
Our real concern and my question here is this. What would you suggest our answer to storing all of our HD video be. We would like to keep an archive of all our raw video coming off of the cameras, but realize how many TBs we will be looking at.
We will be recording around 40 hours of HD video per week and over time this number will continue to grow. You can see how many TBs of video we will be building up. Until now we have been burning all of our archives to BluRay but we would like for our video to be searchable and more accessible.
What is the best mass storage solution without being ridiculously expensive? (although we realize expensive may be the answer to our problem)
Cost aside, what would be the best storage solution to purchase. We were looking at the Promise RAID. We figured it would be smarter to purchase a mass RAID array instead of continuing to purchase multiple xServes whose capacity max out at 6TB.
Also, what are the strengths of adding XSAN to the mixture?
Thank you all in advance for your help.

Your Vixia shoots AVCHD, and while not uncompressed HD (230 MB/s), it will need to be trans-coded into ProRes (17-18 MB/s) for you to edit it in Final Cut which will take up some space. I use AVCHD a lot, and at 1920x1080 @29.97 you'll need about 65GB per hour of trans-coded ProRes footage. If you can get away with ProRes LT or Proxy, you will make it even easier on yourself.
If you have to have all of your footage available for editing this will come at a premium as disk space is more expensive than storing to tape. You mentioned you'll be recording 40 hours per week; at that rate you will need have some sort of archive solution or a massive budget to keep it all on spinning disks.
In the end though, it all still comes down to what your requirements are for editing. Do you have one editor or ten? How many video streams will they need to be able to edit at one time? If it's more than about two (3-4 is pretty typical) and you have more than 2-3 editors, you are rapidly heading for Xsan land. And a big one at that. A basic Xsan with a couple of Promise RAIDs can cost $75,000 or more.
You could get a number of Promise chassis and daisy chain them together using SAS, but this won't scale beyond five units, and your total bandwidth will be limited by the single fibre RAID controller they are all connected to at the top.
If you are on a budget you might want to look at something like this:
http://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=137
They daisy-chain together using SAS. If you connect the head unit to an Xserve using SAS as well, you can then share out your data using Gigabit ethernet, or if you have the budget, 10GigE which is fast enough to edit several streams of ProRes. Maxx has a popular system called Final Share that will allow you to get a lot of data out to several edit stations fairly affordably.
http://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=117
JM

Single best external storage solution for Mac Pro & MacBook Pro ...?

Hello,
I'm still waiting for the Mac Pro delivery I have around me something like four external hard drives from different vendors and different sizes and all containing important data ... it is really a mess, cables, lack of redundancy, etc.
I wanted to replace all these once and for all by a single elegant long-lasting and reliable solution to combine with my new Mac Pro and MacBook Pro. The best I could find was OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 8.0TB containing four internal HDD in double RAID with multiple possible setups: RAID 0 and RAID 1, RAID 10 configurations:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEQX2T8.0S/
Looks like an excellent choice for the only one external storage solution! does anyone has experience with this model? are there better contenders?
Many thanks in advance,
Best regards,
Giovanni

Giovanni,
I have the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 (6 TB) external HD array in a Raid 5 configuration (as received from OWC). I have found it to be excellent when connected to my Mac Pro using a PCI SATA card and the SATA output on the Elite-AL Pro Qx2. The speed of the system under Raid 5 easily supports all but uncompressed high definition video, and the system came with Prosoft's Data Backup software which does an excellent job of backing up other external drives installed on my Mac Pro.
I highly recommend the Qx2 and think you will find it is a good single source solution to providing you with reliable and safe storage for your data. With Raid 5 if one of the HD's in the Qx2 fails, you simply remove it and allow the system to rebuild the data when you insert a new HD. Thus unless two HD's fail simultaneously (high unlikely) you are protected against data loss. Note also that your Mac Pro does not have to be left on while the Qx2 is rebuilding.
Tom

Shared storage solution

Hi people (specially Tom and Jerry, I mean Jim and Jerry)
My bussines is growing and I am adding computers to edit in a colaborative way in order to meet tv deadlines. My biggest pain is to organize all the media so that all machines can work continuously (for instance if I capture 90% in one machine and 10% in another, then one will finish work before the other while the other still has tons to do.) So knowing what to capture in wich machine is imposible and impredictable, and this is when I come to think of a shared storage solution. I already know about xsan and all its benefits, but right now I cant afford it. Still, for dv and maybe 3 or 4 workstatons, I think something much cheaper may suffice. I was thinking of buying a g4, fit as many drives in it as I can (4 or 5 maybe), add raid cards, maybe an external power supply for the drives, and fiberchannel cards and a switch. This is where I take opinions.
Also, I dont know if just networking the machines as in a regular ethernet network would be the way to do it or I would need to use a server os x or something. I know nothing about the software side of this.
So I think this post already opens a lot of questions to start with, and I will be very happy to read your suggestions.
Thanks in advance
Pepo

Thanks David. I didnt find much here, only that gigabit is not all that reliable (wich I already tought) and that fiberchannel is the way to go. I agree with you that time is the main value and so It would be best to buy a turnkey, but right now I dont have the money and still need a solution. I really would not hesitate to buy an xsan, as it would really increase productivity and I would be able to sleep at night knowing my media is safe ( I really fear domestic raids when working on deadlines). For now I will investigate the posibility of seting up a system like the one I mentioned but using fiber instead of ethernet. Once I build this will post my results, and I am still open to suggestions.
Pepo

File storage solution

Im writing an application which downloads web pages , parses them and then stores them on the computer.
Whats the best method to approach the storage solution.
Is it possible to store them as XML files ?
Im looking for a fairly simple method.
Thanks

if the app will be installed locally for each user and each user will download files locally, you probably do not want to go the db route (since in this scenario, all your data will be kept remotely on a db with all your users sharing the data)--UNLESS, you use an in memory rdbms such as hsql which is integrated into your user app which can then store the files in a db. otherwise, with non-techies, you probably want to go the flat-file route. i imagine the workflow to go something like this:
- using your app, the user downloads the page(s) desired
- the app then parses and translates the page to xml and saves the xml file down to the local filesystem
- your app (which will check the default save-down directory for files every time the user goes to the apps "view saved pages" screen) will display all saved files
- the user can then select the specified file to view and your app will read in the file from the filesystem and display it to the user
it will be far more tricky to translate proprietary formats such as .doc, but apis do exist to allow you to do so (to translate .doc files with java, use the jakarta project POI). you might be able to use an api called iText to translate/create .pdf and (maybe) .ps files.
hope this helps.

Isilon storage solution experiences?

We are a small community access facility with growing web streaming needs. We are currently running up to 5 individual CS 5x or 6x systems on Windows 7pro boxes, all core i7 $2k-ish builds; more like gamer PCs than higher NLE systems. Currently all active project\media storage is local on each system. Each system having 1.5 to 3 TB of dedicated media storage space.
We are being pitched some isilon storage solutions in the near future. I was hoping to get feedback from any users with experiences with such. I had always assumed that any reliable networked storage solution was way out of our price range. I also see a lot of posts in the user forums from people having issues using assets over a network.
I downloaded the white papers on Isilon's 1FS 6.5 Adobe CS 6 solution and, at a cursory glance without knowing prices, it seems like it might be cumbersome to manage.
Any practical knowledge or stories out there? Suggestions for network storage for in-edit projects that might suite a small fish facility?

John, the Adobe Premiere Pro QA team and Adobe Anywhere engineering team both have Isilon clusters they use to validate Premiere workflows on network attached storage. A number of there issues you point out are now are adressed by either running Adobe Premiere or following the recommendations in the white paper wfmc pointed out. In a nutshell, keep project and all directory settings local, but keep your media on NAS and you elminate the issues associated with multiple users accessing project metadata or updating each other's media indexes. If you're looking for true multi-user collaboration on the same project metadata, you'll need to look to Adobe Anywhere or MXFserver.
1.John T Smith,
Nov 8, 2012 5:26 PM in reply to wfmc staffer
Report
The best you can do now (see below) is use a file server to keep a master of your video files, and copy files to/from the master over to individual computer for editing... which does, of course, require some kind of file check out/in software so only one person has any given file at a time
No current version of Premiere works properly over a network
-you may NOT "map" your My Documents folder to a network drive
-you MUST give all users administrator accounts to use Premiere
-you MAY also need to... http://forums.adobe.com/thread/969395
-http://forums.adobe.com/thread/771151
-http://forums.adobe.com/thread/851602
-a work around, of sorts http://forums.adobe.com/thread/957523
-and not on a "domain" http://forums.adobe.com/thread/858977
-also PreEl see #5 http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1017199
-more PreEl problem http://forums.adobe.com/thread/975117
Someday, you will actually be able to USE files stored on a server
Adobe Anywhere http://forums.adobe.com/message/4682127
-Announced September 2012 for "future versions" of Premiere Pro
-NO information on pricing or availability date

Storage solutions for my G5

Hi,
I'm desperetely seeking a cost effective solution for my G5.
I have a bunch of external HDs, but i'm exciting the possibility and cost effectiveness of an e-sata solution. I've been obsessing over the Fusion 4 and 5 bay gadgets from sonnet tech, but it's pricier than i'd like to spend. if it turns out to be the best solution out there, then i'll seriously consider it.
BUT, i heard someone mention using a PC case with a powerful power supply and then stacking it with HDs. I'm sort of technical, but i've never seen/heard of anything like this.
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Keebler

If you are just looking for an inexpensive SATA storage solution why not consider the Kingwin 3.5" SATA Aluminum External Hard Drive Enclosure. They are only $33 here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0007SMQLG/arizomacinusergr
You can stack them and as the enclosure is as cheap as some drive trays you can hot swap them while still in the enclosure. Four units runs $130 which is
cheaper than any 4 bay solution I have seen.
The next step up is the Addonics Storage Tower. You can get it with four 5.25" bays and with 6 eSATA ports model ST6ESA for $150 here:
http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_system/ast4.asp
It also has the ability to add hot swap bays or a port multiplier later if you wish to. With the Storage Tower you can build it any way you want it and change it later if you want to.
As far as a SATA card - since you have a PCI PowerMac, I would get a FirmTek 4 port eSATA card model SeriTek/1eVE4. It is the only unit that provides booting and eSATA connections. You can see the AMUG review here:
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/firmtek/1eve4/
This is an awesome 64-bit card that will get your drives running fast. I have one and love it.
The enclosure options above will look better and run better than using a PC case and they will not take up as much space. You might want to read some of the AMUG Storage Tower reviews for more ideas. They are located here:
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/addonics/tower/
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/addonics/3sa/
I hope this helps,
Michael

Best Storage Solution?

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