My storage systems have grown to keep up with storage needs. I am currently running two NAS units in RAID-5:
Unit #1 for client audio projects is a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with four 1500 GB drives, providing about 4.3 TiB of storage.
Unit #2 for personal projects and general data is a Thecus N5200 Pro with five 1000 GB drives, providing about 3.6 TiB of storage.
These two units are then duplicated off-site and connected by a fibre optic link (currently running at 100 Mb/s while the rest of the network is running at 1000 Mb/s).
After the Goderich tornado in 2011, I added a farther-offsite collection of 500 and 1000 GB 2.5-inch USB drives in a rugged steel case. Makes me even safer.
One of the reasons for the upgrade to the Thecus units for personal storage is that they can grow to 3.6 TiB [done in 2010] of storage with the addition of one 1000 GB drive to each. We are in the midst of a film scanning marathon that is seeing me scanning my Velvia slides to 36 MB files and my son scanning our family negatives to 18 MB files. We’re running the Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED in multiple shifts between the two of us. It was my son’s summer job.
With the addition of this storage and a subtle change in my storage model, I decided that it was time to re-think how the NAS units got loaded. I am still ingesting to a local hard drive; 750 GB for the main audio workstation and 250 GB for the photo workstation.
I use ViceVersa Pro from TGRMN and have loved it for many years. I use it to compare the work or release folders on the local machine with the target shares on the NASes. It then pushes the files that are older or non-existent on the NASes to both NASes. In the case of the audio workstation, it can push both client projects and personal projects to the two NASes and their off-site mirrors. We do NOT propagate deletes.
In order to avoid heat-soak of the RME Multiface AD/DA converters attached to the audio computer, I wanted to shut it down after a push session. Rather than just use ViceVersa’s scheduled run system and run the backup sometime when I am sleeping, I wanted to start the backup manually as soon as I was done and then have the machine shut down.
There is an undocumented command within Windows XP called “Shutdown”. Click on run and then enter “cmd” to open a DOS box. Type “Shutdown” (w/o the quotes) and hit enter. This will provide a list of parameters.
To shut down the computer enter
shutdown -s
To abort the shutdown enter
shutdown -a
And to change the default 30 second timeout to 60 seconds enter
shutdown -s -t 60
You can add a script for ViceVersa to run after it’s done, so I added the shutdown command to a batch file. I made this ViceVersa configuration an auto-run shortcut on my desktop. Right above it, I made another shortcut with shutdown’s abort command in it.
Now, when I’m done for the day, I can run the file pushout routines and still have the computer shut down as soon as it’s done–while I’m sleeping.
If you want to do off-site with NAS units but without the interconnection and the constant checking and alerting–in other words, you want a backup unit that just sits there off-site and is brought together with the main one every few weeks–then I would strongly suggest RAID-6 for both. This is the configuration I would suggest considering if you live in an area subject to major earthquakes and/or wildfires. It’s obvious that my California mentality hasn’t fully left me!
For “office” type work, all of the files reside on the local Thecus NAS. We run an update routine from our 24/7 Mail client PC to backup those documents nightly. The mail itself is pushed out as per the above model. Again, we do not propagate deletes.
A complete set of backups from local to off-site also run nightly on the photo computer, although that is not kept up every night. All this is done with ViceVersa Pro.
One of the neat things we do with ViceVersa is for JPG files in the images shares, we do not propagate changes from the local to the remote NAS. In that way, the image on the remote NAS is more like a “negative” for the family digital cameras that shoot JPGs. In that way, if one of my sons edits an image and wants the original back–and violates our rule that derivatives are renamed–we still have the original. I’d rather risk losing the derivative image than the original should the local NAS fail. We also do that with WAV files as we have had some minor modifications made to WAV file metadata with earlier versions of software. It does not seem to be an issue with the current software.