Topic: More (photo) storage for iMac

[charlie]

My wife's computer is an iMac from several years ago. It has about 250GB but it's always full. We have a 2TB external hard drive that we're using for Time Machine backups. We also put a bunch of stuff on there every time the machine is full to make room for new stuff. It still has a lot of space (roughly 1.5 TB).

We take a lot of pictures at a high resolution (because my wife likes to manipulate them and print 8x10s). We fill up several gigs a month or more of just pictures. So I'm trying to figure out how to handle them all. We've weeded out a bunch of pictures from previous years so clearing space that way won't help much.

Right now I moved our iPhoto library to the hard drive and decided to leave it connected full time (it wasn't before). But now all our photos are on the hard drive so if it dies they die.

I'm looking for solutions that will provided some backup for the photos so if one thing dies we don't lose them all. But of course we have to be able to quickly download new photos (without having to clear space or weed out photos every time) and be able to go through them to make photobooks and whatnot. Price is a major concern, but I might be willing to spend some money (like $100-ish) for a good solution.

Any ideas? Danke!

[KnuckleBuckett]

Cloud storage?  I would guess Mac has their version of Skydrive or Dropbox.

[charlie]

It's a thought. We have the free Dropbox account. My concerns there were cost (might be significantly more than $100 long term) and ease of access (can we browse our photos quickly without keeping copies on our full drive). Maybe Dropbox or iCloud has a smoother integration that I'm not aware of.

I also considered a second external drive or replacing the iMac hard drive if that's possible, but I wasn't sure if those things would make sense.

[Mike]

Are you trying to find an archiving solution or a storage solution?  If you are looking for an archiving solution I'd take a look at Amazon Glacier.

[ober]

The amount of storage you are after doesn't make sense for a dropbox account.  For reference, a 100GB account is $100/year.  I think your best solution is a second external HD, or better yet put your 2 external HDs in a raid so you don't have to have 2 backups running.

[charlie]

Are you trying to find an archiving solution or a storage solution?  If you are looking for an archiving solution I'd take a look at Amazon Glacier.

I'm thinking storage more than archiving, although I can use the external drive for storage and something like Glacier for archiving the drive's storage. I think it might be too expensive, though.

The amount of storage you are after doesn't make sense for a dropbox account.  For reference, a 100GB account is $100/year.  I think your best solution is a second external HD, or better yet put your 2 external HDs in a raid so you don't have to have 2 backups running.

Is the raid easy/doable with Mac and the existing drive?

[ober]

No clue on how it works with Mac.  Sorry.

[Mike]

Are you trying to find an archiving solution or a storage solution?  If you are looking for an archiving solution I'd take a look at Amazon Glacier.

I'm thinking storage more than archiving, although I can use the external drive for storage and something like Glacier for archiving the drive's storage. I think it might be too expensive, though.

If you are looking for storage then yeah, glacier isn't for you.

The amount of storage you are after doesn't make sense for a dropbox account.  For reference, a 100GB account is $100/year.  I think your best solution is a second external HD, or better yet put your 2 external HDs in a raid so you don't have to have 2 backups running.

Is the raid easy/doable with Mac and the existing drive?

Let me talk to a buddy to get the specifics but there are external units that do all the RAID stuff so the OS doesn't have to know about it.  You just put the drive in, do some configuration, and it handles the rest.

[Mike]

What one of by buddies suggested for an external raid unit: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=210

[charlie]

What one of by buddies suggested for an external raid unit: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=210

Thanks for checking.

That's cool and probably what I'd want in the long run. But it's well out of my price range (and makes my existing 2 TB unnecessary which is a waste).

I guess there's no way to buy a second hard drive and do a RAID thing with existing, separate drives?

[charlie]

After some research it looks like you can set up a RAID for Macs with external hard drives, but they have to be empty. So if I'm going to buy two new drives I might as well buy one with RAID built in.

Next option to research is upgrading the Mac's internal drive somehow.

[kermi3]

Doesn't RAID require at least 2 drives?  Isn't that the point?

[charlie]

Doesn't RAID require at least 2 drives?  Isn't that the point?

I already have one. I could buy another and use RAID and still stay sort of in my budget. But I'd have to empty the one I have which I'm not going to do without backing it up. I could borrow an external drive for that, but now we're getting really complicated for someone with limited time.

[kermi3]

Cool.  What about something like Crash Plan for backup/protection from theft/fire too?

[charlie]

Cool.  What about something like Crash Plan for backup/protection from theft/fire too?

Too? Seems like that might solve the problem by itself. I already have the drive for storage, I just need a backup in case the drive fails. At $69/year for unlimited storage this might be a solution.

Question is, what's the catch? Why is this cheap compared to other online backup/storage options?