Mac Network Storage of Pictures, Lightroom and Backups

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If you use one Mac to work on files I'd use an external drive for your work files. I have traditionally always used Firewire, because it's fast and the drives can be daisy-chained, but have moved to USB 3

Using an external drive means you can forget about iSCSI, AFP, SMB, Ethernet & everything else. It's the simplest way, the fastest and the best

For backup I'd use another external drive and make nightly clones with Carbon Copy Cloner, Super Duper or similar. IMHO you'd be better off using two backup drives and rotating them than having a RAID for backup

All the NAS drives I've come across have supported AFP in their own way. That's not generally the problem with them. Poor technical support, buggy software, useless features and slow processors are the problems

I installed a Synology for a customer recently. Not bad as NAS drives go and the supplied software was pretty good. You can connect external USB drives but they need to be formatted as FAT32 (or other PC format) so Mac-formatted drives are no good. The customer had some issues with file not copying and it was hard work trying to find out why. I expect it was illegal filenames - something that is still an issue when copying files to a non-Macintosh file system

If you have filenames containing illegal characters you will be forced to rename them to copy successfully to the NAS. This will affect your file links or image databases

In my experience NAS drives are more trouble than they are worth.

Nick Froome
 
MarcM said:
cheap small switches cause all kinds if issues.
Click to expand...
Yes. But TP-link managed switches aren't cheap/small switches.... The ones I have are rack mountable and designed for corporate networks (I can't see ANY home installation using SFP slots).

Businesses don't worry about finding the cheapest route for quality and when you have many hundreds of network connections, you may well be better with HP. But this isn't a full enterprise class network...
 
Fair enough glad you're happy :)

Jonathan, you have a few options here. Let me know if you need any help.
 
bolide said:
If you use one Mac to work on files I'd use an external drive for your work files. I have traditionally always used Firewire, because it's fast and the drives can be daisy-chained, but have moved to USB 3

Using an external drive means you can forget about iSCSI, AFP, SMB, Ethernet & everything else. It's the simplest way, the fastest and the best

For backup I'd use another external drive and make nightly clones with Carbon Copy Cloner, Super Duper or similar. IMHO you'd be better off using two backup drives and rotating them than having a RAID for backup

All the NAS drives I've come across have supported AFP in their own way. That's not generally the problem with them. Poor technical support, buggy software, useless features and slow processors are the problems

I installed a Synology for a customer recently. Not bad as NAS drives go and the supplied software was pretty good. You can connect external USB drives but they need to be formatted as FAT32 (or other PC format) so Mac-formatted drives are no good. The customer had some issues with file not copying and it was hard work trying to find out why. I expect it was illegal filenames - something that is still an issue when copying files to a non-Macintosh file system

If you have filenames containing illegal characters you will be forced to rename them to copy successfully to the NAS. This will affect your file links or image databases

In my experience NAS drives are more trouble than they are worth.

Nick Froome
Click to expand...

Hi Nicholas,

what you are suggesting (external drives) is roughly what i do know, but not having a work area - i do my work either on the couch, kitchen table (or bed..) means it is a pain to drag my drives along with me, and i am always running the risk of pulling the lead or worse, dropiing the drive onto the floor.

So i have decided to go for a wireless solution that i can always connect to.

I would also prefer a versioned back up rather than a clone.

As i me mentioned above, i am considering moving the backup drive off site and back up changes to it live (or at least hourly).
 
neil_g said:
over wireless may be painful.
Click to expand...

I am currently backing up to amazon web sevices quite happily, and since the traditional bottleneck is the source upload, i hope to have a similar back up speed - though would have to verify before putting down the money.

I will make the initial back up locally then move off site for the incremental back ups.
 
Rapscallion said:
I am currently backing up to amazon web sevices quite happily, and since the traditional bottleneck is the source upload, i hope to have a similar back up speed - though would have to verify before putting down the money.

I will make the initial back up locally then move off site for the incremental back ups.
Click to expand...

i mean accessing your working files over wireless.
 
neil_g said:
i mean accessing your working files over wireless.
Click to expand...

I will be doing the initial import, sort and edit locally - then move to the nas.

Also, all previews will be stored locally, along with the catalogue.

Though I would appreciate feedback from anybody who does / has done the same.
 
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