Re: The Future of Backing Up & Drobo-like Technologies

In article
<wyvern-2875CD.11382411012008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Madwen <wyvern@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <nospam.News.Bob-88E97F.22523510012008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Bob Harris <nospam.News.Bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article
<wyvern-B09ED3.13000910012008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Madwen <wyvern@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm in a real dilemma about how to back up our three, Airport-networked
Macs. Up to now, I've used Retrospect and backed them up individually
to external hard drives, using alternating, dual, incremental backups.
But now, with iTunes, iPods, Apple TV, iPhoto, as well as downloadable
movies and other visual media, it seems that a very large amount of
backup space will be needed in the near future. Likely some people have
already reached a critical point.

When I first heard about Drobo, a backup device that handles an array of
standard, "hot-swappable", hard drives, I was very enthused---
especially with regard to the device's purported ability to handle
backups absent the user tedium that usually accompanies manual backup
activities.

Then I found out that Drobo (not really a robot) starts at five-hundred
smackaroonies and that does not include a singe drive.

What is the loss of your data worth? I'm not being silly here,
as I've lost disks and data. And I've messed with lots of
different backup medium including various tape systems, individual
SCSI, Firewire, and USB attached storage.

Worth of data is certainly a main variable. If my data were not
important, I would not have invested in a bevy of external backup drives
and bought many upgrades of Retrospect. There are other considerations,
however, such as the reliability of the backup system, expected
longevity, current & future compatibility, ability to expand, etc.

Drobo sounds like a fantastic idea. However, the abbreviated warranty
gives me little confidence and the lack of frank discussion about a long
term commitment to the Macintosh platform (updates and upgrades) gives
me pause.

In the email they sent about MacWorld, then mentioned that 50% of
their customer's are Mac users. I would say they have an economic
incentive to continue Mac development.

If they do announce new products at MacWorld, then I would say
that gives a very strong indications of how much they value the
Mac user and Mac market.

But reliable Crystal balls are in short supply, so I will not try
to predict the future.

I've had my share of Macs since my little 128k original so
I've been around long enough to have seen various companies and products
that were gung-ho Mac and then later abandoned us--- sometimes in as
little as a year or two--- (Wordperfect, MORE, Canvas, HP, Excel's
Visual Basic, MacTools, and lots more). But perhaps, in these better
Mac times, I am being overly cautious and paranoid. A little voice
keeps whispering "remember Symantec" in the back of my brain. :)

But Symantec was software, this is hardware. And even though
Drobo is expandable, I'm betting that the storage vendors will
continue to double capacity every 18 months (on schedule) and even
the expandable Drobo will find that they have changed the
interface standards yet again (USB 3, SATA III, etc...), the world
will have moved to 2.5" disks as standard, just like they moved
from washing machine sized disks, to desk drawer sized disks, to
do 5.25" disks, to 3.5" disks, ... It will be something that
will make whatever storage solution you choose obsolete in a few
years. Want some SCSI disks, SCSI DAT drive, or how about some
floppy disks? :-)

I want to be sure I am investing in a long term solution with a
reliable, committed company. I'd also like to know, more precisely,
what exactly it is in this product that makes it so expensive. It isn't
so much that I doubt it; I just want to know the particulars. I'm not
really fond of the "magic box" concept. And Drobo is not really a robot
either...

Data Robot is just a "Marketing Term". For all intents and
purposes it is behaves like a RAID, without needing to do RAID
configurations, use matching disks, etc...

I've come to the conclusion that if the hardware allows me lots of
storage, redundancy, and an easy to use human interface, I'll pay
the price.

It's a USB device, not Firewire

2 things. First Drobo is announcing new stuff at MacWorld this
month (or so their email to existing customers said). So maybe
they will be offering additional interfaces. If you are at all
interested in a Drobo, it is not a long wait to find out what they
have planned.

Indeed... and I had no idea. We can hope for some exciting
developments. I know it is newly for sale on the Apple website,
however, so I have to wonder why they'd be selling the "old" if
something new is on the horizon. Call me Ms BlackCloud.

Most likely because their employees like to get paid on a regular
basis just like the rest of us :-)

The other thing is how you are going to do backups. If you are
going to do repeated full multi-gigabyte on a regular basis, then
the fastest interface you can get is what you want.

However, if you are going to do mostly incremental backups and the
modified files are not themselves huges multi-gigabyte files, then
a USB interface will work fine.

That is good to know. I've done incremental backups and they've worked
just fine in our home setting. I'm hoping to replace my G4 Quicksilver
with an iMac soon. Do you know if I'd be able to use the two
(relatively new) Seagate Barracudas from the G4 in the Drobo? I also
have 3 Mercury Elite's from OWC in FW/USB drive enclosures. Would I be
able to yank those out and use them in the Drobo as well?

The drives need to Serial ATA disks (SATA). Unless you installed
an SATA controller in the Quicksilver, I would expect Quicksilver
drives are Parallel ATA (PATA or EIDE) drives.

As to the OWC Mercury Elite drives, a lot would depend on how old
they are and if OWC had switched over to SATA drives or if they
used PATA or EIDE.

Personally, I have my Drobo attached to an older iBook G4 which
I've setup on a closet as my home Network Server with the Drobo
being the primary storage device (it currently has a terabyte of
usable storage). All of my backups are over the home Airport
network (802.11g speeds), along with a backup of my Mom's iMac in
Pennsylvania over the internet (she only has a 768kilobit DSL
uplink), so a USB connection for the disks is way faster than my
needs.

And of course since I'm using a Mac OS X system as my network
server, I have 100% compatible AFP and HFS+ support (the iBook G4
is running Leopard, so I can even do Time Machine networked
backups).

Fascinating. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you taking the time
to elaborate on the Drobo and your setup. Thanks!

and I have no idea if it can plug into Airport and
backup three or more computers.

Yes it can, HOWEVER, at the current time the Airport Extreme will
not support Leopard's Time Machine backup service. I assume this
is because either it's HFS+ file system support lacks new Leopard
features, or changes in the Appletalk Filing Protocol are missing
from the Airport Extreme (just guessing). Again, by using a Mac
running Leopard I side step these issues.

Ah ha. So... I could leave one of the Seagates in the G4 and do a
similar kind of thing (if I can figure out how to do it ;) Does that go
for the new Airport Extreme as well, btw? I was hoping to get the one
with the 802.11n protocol sometime soon but maybe I need to wait on that
as well.

Assuming you have a place to keep the Quicksilver and are willing
to leave it on all the time, or boot it up for backups, it is easy
to have it be your home file server. Just plug it into the home
network (ethernet or Airport), and since you are using Retrospect,
you can use the Retrospect remote client to handle the backups.

Or you could just have each Mac mount a network drive from the
Quicksilver and then run retrospect, SuperDuper, Carbon Copy
Cloner, or one of the other backup up utilities available.

Leopard's Time Machine when backing up to a remote Leopard system
acting as the file server, will save all the necessary access
information and automatically mount the remote volume when it is
time to do a Time Machine backup.

For my pre-Leopard backups (which I'm still using), I've been
using some Unix stuff to do my backups. Especially when backing
up my Mom's Mac in Pennsylvania. For Mom, my iBook G4 reaches out
via ssh for security across the internet, and then I run the Unix
rsync utility over that ssh connection to grab my Mom's files.

Maybe when I have more Leopard experience and have upgraded my
Mom's iMac to Leopard, I'll see if I can do Leopard over the
internet, but that is way out in the future.

[...]
What are others of you, with multiple computers, doing or planning for
future backup strategies? And what do you think of Drobo? Are there
other alternatives?

There are less than $500 1TB storage boxes out there (most are
just two 500GB disks in one box that can be configured as two
500GB disks, as one 500GB mirrored volume, or as a concatenated
1TB volume. You can find boxes like this for anywhere between
$250 and $350, where the lower prices tend to be USB or USB &
eSATA, and the higher end tend to be Firewire 800 capable.

You might consider something like Mozy.com (an EMC servcie) as an
on-line backup where you encrypt before it leaves your Mac. The
free services gives you 2GB of on-line storage, or $5/month per
system, for unlimited on-line storage for your internal disk
(commercial licenses are available that will include external
disks).

Jungle Disk which provides a similar service to Mozy only it uses
the Amazon S3 on-line storage service (15 cent/gigabyte/month).
Again your data is encrypted before leaving your Mac. Jungle Disk
and S3 do not limit what disks you backup, so you can include
external disks.

From what I've read, if you want a network storage server, that is
not an old Mac (like I'm using), then Infrant's ReadyNAS is the
best Mac compatible network server.

Of course if you want the most "Bang for the Buck", then you get a
no-name PC box with lots of internal disk bays, and run FreeNAS or
a similar Linux or FreeBSD based network attached storage system.
Of course you will have to get your hands dirty, but for some
people that is half the fun.

Wow... you are just brimming with ideas! I have high speed DSL but I
must admit that I'm kind of shy about backing up over the internet,
especially with the amount of data we are starting to generate on our
three Macs. Please forgive my ignorance but I don't really understand
what your network server does other than being connected to the Drobo.
(egad I feel so stupid)

My iBook G4 provides several services. At its simplest it is a
file server offering up its disks for remote access to other Macs
at home.

Since I've been a software developer for 30+ years (can you say
"Univac"; my first full time employer), and worked with Unix for
16+ years I've done some things most people would not want to do
(some things maybe I shouldn't even want to do :-) ).

Anyway, my iBook G4 also actively reaches out to backup several
systems using ssh and rsync (Unix utilities). ssh provides the
end-to-end encryption when I go across the internet. But setting
up ssh for hands free operation both local and across the internet
has lots of setup stuff to be done.

I do not expect these Unix rsync based backup to be bootable, I
just expect that if I loose a system I can re-install Mac OS X
from the installation DVD, and then restore files from my backups.
I'm sure it will require a lot of personal intervention but doable.

Right now, my iBook G4 is Leopard and I have one other system in
the house that is Leopard, so I use Time Machine to the iBook G4
from that other Leopard system. And I have the iBook G4's
internal disk Time Machine to the Drobo as well, but then again,
the iBook G4 doesn't really generate a lot of new files just
acting as a server.

I've also attached a EyeTV video capture box to my iBook G4. So
if I want to convert a VCR tape, or if I want to capture some TV
program, I can use the iBook G4 for that task. There is just one
little problem. I don't think the EyeTV software is really
Leopard friendly, as I've had the iBook G4 lock up if I leave the
EyeTV converter box attached and the EyeTV background software
running.

My network includes a 16" 2 GHz Core Duo 2 iMac (daughter), 1.x GHz G4
iBook (husband), and my 867 MHz G4 Quicksilver, Siemens DSL router, 2
printers, scanner, and the 802.11g Airport Extreme... oh and the three
external HDs. Good grief, these things do start to collect. Anyway,
I'd like to get a 24" iMac with the best graphics. So could I leave the
G4 QS on the network (somewhere, Light knows where) and use it to serve
the printers, scanner and Drobo? I guess I need to read a book about
how to do that. My questions are just so elementary... like do I need a
monitor for the server or can I access it remotely, etc etc. Sorry to
babble on and on. My head is going to burst... LOL.

With Leopard you will have Back-to-My-Mac that should allow you to
remotely control the QS. I'm not sure if you need a monitor or
not, as my server is a laptop so the monitor is part of the
package. I do remember a lot of discussion about doing this with
a Mac mini, and I think some of the approaches involved attaching
a monitor cable or some kind of placebo monitor adaptor. Not sure
if Leopard will need something like that or not.

There are lots of ways to access the screen of a remote Mac.
Obviously Leopards Back-to-My-Mac is one. The Apple Remote
Desktop server (Sharing preferences) and a copy of Chicken of the
VNC on the viewer Mac is another way (I use this approach). And
then there are a bunch of others such as LogMeIn.com,
NTRconnect.com, YuuGuu.com, etc...

As for what to read, you might look at some of the "Take Control"
books from TidBits.com, and then there is just spending some time
in a bookstore with computer books and a cup of that expensive
coffee in their cafe :-)

I've said a lot, but no matter what there is a lot to be said for
keeping it simple.

Thanks again so much for all these ideas!

Madeleine

Bob Harris
.

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