Photo Shop and working with a Drobo storage.

[Amedeus]

There's a lot of good stuff in this thread.

My work flow.

All my raw files are stored on an 8 bay, 3Tb/bay Drobo. 24T. I'm 80% full and I'm not noticing a "slow down"

Drobo is only used for storage, not working on files.

I have a 250Gb scratchdisk for CS6

All my retouching and editing work ends up on my main drive (1T, MacPro) and when finished goes to Drobo and one other extermal 4Tb RAID which stores CS6 files only. Once full, that drive gets replaced. My main drive gets cleaned off when I reach about 800Gb.

Once a quarter all my files, PSD and original digital or scanned film files are backed up on drives that are stored in my office in a sizable suitcase, 7 miles from my studio. This is a process that can take a few evenings of my time ;-) I acutally wish I could afford a second Drobo or similar at this time for easier maintenance rather than lugging around the suitcase but that's another story.

Backing up on a single device, RAID or not, is not considered a viable back-up strategy in my mind. Hard drives do fail and we believe we are safe with RAIDs. Sometimes we are. Power supplies fail and are capable of wiping out multiple hard drives in a RAID. Control boards fail and restripe/wipe parts or all from your RAID (Had this happen on a Buffalo RAID ... operating system bug, all data lost on the RAID ... I did have a back-up at the office ... )

YMMV

[Kirk Gittings]

Hard drives do fail

I keep an original HD and a backup for each year. Used to be 1GB each but recently gone over to 2TB each. I assumed I was safe. A few years ago I needed to pull some stock for a magazine request from storage 5-6 years pervious. The original failed so I walked over to get the backup. On the way back I bumped my elbow on a shelf and dropped the back up. Neither was recoverable-a whole years worth of work. I had to contact all my clients and get the files I had delivered back-never have completely. Now in addition I have a web backup.

[Light Guru]

It is connected through a Netgear Pro Safe 24 port global switch Each computer is cabled to this switch

Each computer? If you are using the same drive from multiple computers at the same time this will definitely show down performance.

As I was working the bottom line told me I had 13.5tb available

By bottom line are you referring the the bottom line in the OSX finder?

You CANNOT judge free space on a Drobo via the Finder. Like I said in a previous comment when setting up a Drobo you select what size you want the drive to max out at, this is the size that the Drobo tells the computer for how big the drive is.

For example when I set up my Drobo I set it up to so that it could be up to 8TB in size, however I only have 4 1TB drives in the Drobo. Because of this the Finder acutely reports the drive to have more free space then total storage space.




This is why I said to get the size and free space from the Drobo Dashboard.

It is vary posible your Drobo is almost full (thus causing performance issues) even though the finder says it has lots of free space.

[bob carnie]

Thanks
Learning a lot thanks to all of you.

I am finding out that what you are saying is exactly right. I am using up a lot of space with redundant files so I am deleting copies this weekend.


What about Cloud storage for the most important files ( I have 2300 files of my personal work - file size averages 200 mb, - I cannot lose this stuff.
not at least until I print the edition so you can see this will take me years, took me years to scan.

I am being advised google, amazon cloud storage and just pay for it .

any thoughts ??

Each computer? If you are using the same drive from multiple computers at the same time this will definitely show down performance.



By bottom line are you referring the the bottom line in the OSX finder?

You CANNOT judge free space on a Drobo via the Finder. Like I said in a previous comment when setting up a Drobo you select what size you want the drive to max out at, this is the size that the Drobo tells the computer for how big the drive is.

For example when I set up my Drobo I set it up to so that it could be up to 8TB in size, however I only have 4 1TB drives in the Drobo. Because of this the Finder acutely reports the drive to have more free space then total storage space.




This is why I said to get the size and free space from the Drobo Dashboard.

It is vary posible your Drobo is almost full (thus causing performance issues) even though the finder says it has lots of free space.

[Greg Miller]

Thanks
Learning a lot thanks to all of you.

I am finding out that what you are saying is exactly right. I am using up a lot of space with redundant files so I am deleting copies this weekend.


What about Cloud storage for the most important files ( I have 2300 files of my personal work - file size averages 200 mb, - I cannot lose this stuff.
not at least until I print the edition so you can see this will take me years, took me years to scan.

I am being advised google, amazon cloud storage and just pay for it .

any thoughts ??

Cloud storage is great. The challenge is getting large amounts to the cloud at Internet speeds. Unless you have very fast upload speeds, it will take months and months to get the data to Google or amazon..you can look at cloud storage where you can seed the cloud by shipping a USB drive. But those plans tend to cost significantly more than amazon.

[bob carnie]

I have pretty much standard upload speed for small business, nothing beyond that, I will look into how to do this using USB drives.

Cloud storage is great. The challenge is getting large amounts to the cloud at Internet speeds. Unless you have very fast upload speeds, it will take months and months to get the data to Google or amazon..you can look at cloud storage where you can seed the cloud by shipping a USB drive. But those plans tend to cost significantly more than amazon.