18 Mar Thee Backup Solution
25 MBs a pop, yes, that’s right… every time I click the shutter on my 5D mkII, the 21.1 megapixel DSLR consumes 25 megs on the memory card. The real concern is not how fast today’s cameras fill up 8 or even 16 GB memory cards, it’s at the end of the day when I have a total of 10-20 gigs of file data to upload, edit, and store. Shoot 3, 5, however many sessions a week… you start eating up disc space like crazy. I store and backup every picture I’ve ever shot in the last 5 years. I used to store all of my data on a 1 TB drive, then have another 1TB drive to backup the first drive in case of a drive failure. It was annoying, cumbersome and I got real tired of all the manual backups. Enter the drobo unit.
The drobo is the best thing to happen to anyone who needs a simple, no thinking required, redundant storage solution. It’s a RAID’d external hard drive setup (RAID is a fancy acronym meaning if you lose one or two drives, you still retain all of your data). I won’t go into the details, you can surf the drobo site for that. The drobo unit can hold up to 4 hard drives of any size, you can even vary the size and make of the drives. The drobo unit then takes all of the drives and combines them into one large virtual drive. For example, my drobo has four 1.5 TB drives, and all RAID’d together as one drive, providing space for redundancy across all drives, I get a little over 4 TB of storage. Like I said before, I can have up to 2 drives fail at one time, and all of my data is still secure. This all provides me with a massive storage device with the peace of mind that all my data is safe. It can connect up to your PC or Mac, with high-speed USB and firewire interfaces (it also can be configured and hooked directly into your network and accessed from any machine on that network).
The most beautiful part about this whole setup is the upgrade abilities of the drobo. You can at any time pull out the smallest drive out of the unit, stick in a larger drive, let the drobo re-distribute the data across the new drive, and you will have effectively expanded your storage space. As hard drive technology increases in size and decreases in price, you’ll be able to grow your storage with your business, and at a great price.
If you are serious about your business, regardless what that business may be, you need to get one of these bad boys. I have the most basic drobo solution, however, there are larger, more robust drobo units that can store insane amounts of data. Pick and choose the right solution that best fits your business!