So, despite my name being the Megabyte Mike, I'm quite datacentric. Having upon gigabytes of files. Possibly into the incomparable uncharitable territories. Consider me a digital packrat. Or just too lazy to delete files. Not including my laptop, I have around 1277.6GBs of files (or roughly 1.25TB). This includes two operating system installs, multiple applications, music of my own and others, videos of my own and others, the lovely pictures I upload to flickr, and more.

Obviously, I could hamper down and consolidate huge swaths of this data (which I'll most likely be pursuing eventually to optimize my datasets), but I figured unplanned redundancy might be a good thing (in terms of backups).

While I have to admit, I've been lucky not to been struck with severe data loss yet (there was once a time a long time ago when 1GB were new, and CompUSA didn't know the difference between a printer cable and a SCSI cable) I had started a little homemade RAID system.

RAID systems are useful if setup properly, since your data can be mirrored/spanned across multiple drives to provide a virtualized backup essentially. While I'm not too familiar with the technicalities of such, elaborate equations are probably involved so where, the 1s and 0s become 0s, 1s, and 2s? Basically, if you have three drives RAID'ed together, and one drive goes bad, you can pop in another drive and all your data is still there.

This has been a rather "rocket-scientist," time consuming process involving you to pre-plan how much data you will need, how to setup specific drivers and programs, and etc. It was a pain in the ass when I did this. I had this home built NAS RAID running Debian. It worked, it stored my data well. I just had to send commands it's way when booting up and such.

Only problem was, if I was at a show or off-site I couldn't take that data with me. UNTIL NOW!



That's Drobo, and it has three 500GB drives stuffed into it. That's all I had to do to set it up. Other than plug in the FW800 cable. Didn't have to setup any fancy shmancy software, or anything. Oh yea, and it fit nice and neatly into my desk (which is another story).

I configured it for 8TB. So the computer will say that I have 8TB available, when in reality I only have 1TB available. This means, in the future I can remove a drive, and stick in a new one with a larger capacity and my data will still be there (no more additional copying of data).

See that I have one drive bay open still? Well, that's for a 1TB drive I'll be stuffing into it soon. First, I'm copying all the files off onto the Drobo using a rather efficient method called rsync.


Yes I know how to use Cmd+Shift+3, but I think an actual photo of the screen is more artsy.

Rsync will essentially compared drive A to drive B, and copy the necessary files over. It'll also check to see if it was copied properly as well, and overall, will "sync" the source and destination. Pretty nifty, huh?

Seriously, if you are a media professional, or even just a datawhore like myself. I STRONGLY suggest drobo as an easy "get it done," device. It's portable, it's easy to use, and it just works.

Drobo has not paid me anything to write this, I rarely rarely rarely hype on products, but feel this one is an exception. P.S. If DataRobotics would like to send me free swag *cough cough*