I would stay away from the NAS like others have suggested for cost, performance and flexibility reasons. It's cheaper to buy two external drives and using one as a backup than purchasing a NAS and setting up the RAID. After which you still don't have a stand alone backup.
I also have a Mac and two 400Gb Firewire/USB drives. One as a primary and one as a backup which stays disconnected and powered off till I want to run another backup. The software that I use for the drive copying is called SuperDuper http://www.shirt-pocket.com/ SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html. I've actually partitioned each drive into two partitions, one used to mirror the drive in the computer and one to hold the music. That allows me to nightly mirror my drive in the computer to the external drive. One benefit of Firewire over USB is that with Firewire I can boot from the external drive if needed. The second drive is partitioned the same and that is used to backup both partitions on the primary external drive, which I do monthly. I hope that all makes sense. My total investment for the two 400Gb Firewire/USB drives is less than $400. Pat On Apr 30, 2007, at 9:59 PM, aubuti wrote: > > TexasRugger;198732 Wrote: >> Can anyone walk me through the benefits/drawbacks of NAS vs. a >> basic USB >> external drive? I haven't started to rip my collection yet (just >> bought >> the SB3 a few days ago) and I want to set this up right. I'm >> really not >> interested in the ability to share my music files across any other >> computers. However, I am interested in redundancy (RAID), as I don't >> want to do this again if a hard drive fails. I'm working with a >> Macintosh, BTW. Any pros, cons? Thanks, >> >> Steve > If all you're looking for is external storage and plan to run > slimserver off your Mac, and not interested in sharing files off > computers, then I'd recommend two external USB drives. The USB drives > are simpler, so they're generally less expensive --- sometimes much > less expensive --- than NASs. > > Why two external USB drives? Because eventually every hard drive will > fail, and so you'll need one as a backup. Personally, I think RAID is > overrated for applications like storing your music library. It > protects > well against down time from drive failure, but not against other > dangers > like human error (accidentally deleting files), theft, fire, flood, > stray projectiles, etc. If possible, keep the backup drive off-site, > and bring it home as needed to update the backup. > > I use a NAS for my main music library because it runs slimserver and > it's also an integral part of the backup system for the other > computers > in the house. I keep a USB at the office, and periodically bring it > home > to sync/backup. > > > -- > aubuti > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > -- > aubuti's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2074 > View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=34911 > > _______________________________________________ > discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
