Since earlier this year, I’ve been making a focused effort to ensure that my and my family’s important data is safe. It’s the closest I ever get to making a New Year’s resolution[1]. When I picked up my 2008 MacPro, a couple years ago, I built my own Fusion Drive, but also threw in a second, larger spinning disk drive for internal Time Machine backups.
Obviously, a single copy is not a backup, and for years I have kept all of my documents in Dropbox. That’s a second copy of most stuff. I signed up for BackBlaze earlier this year as well. That captures everything Dropbox does, plus the few things on my MacPro’s hard drive[2], that aren’t in Dropbox.
I recently added a Synology NAS to the mix. On-site, large storage (with multi-drive redundancy), including multiple user accounts, various web services, and slew of other features made it very appealing. I picked the DS415play, because of the hardware video transcoder, and hot-swappable drives[3].
The Synology also allows each user account to sync their Dropbox (among other cloud storage providers) to a folder in their user home directory, it seemed like a nice way to have a second on-site copy of all of my and Lindsay’s docs.
In addition, the PhotoStation feature will help me solve the issue I’ve been struggling with: how do I make sure that Lindsay and I both have access to our family photos, consistently, effortlessly, and without relying on an intermediary cloud service. Neither of us are interested in uploading all of our photos to Facebook or Flickr just to share them. It also takes thought, effort, and coordination on our parts to get photos our of our Photo Streams give them to one another. I want to minimize that, while ensuring that these photos are well backed up.
Unfortunately, there’s no package to backup my Synology to BackBlaze, and Marco had an article that highlighted his issues trying to make that work, and he wound up settling on Crash Plan. I’ll likely do the same.
Expect posts in the coming weeks about how I’m messing with this stuff. I’ve found it to be a lot of fun, already, and I’m pretty impressed with the Synology. It’s a little fiddly for most people, but if you’re inclined to be a nerd - especially a Unix-y nerd - it’ll be right up your alley.
I’m a big fan of the idea that if something is important to you, you should be doing it already. ↩
You might have noticed that I’m pretty focused on backing up my MacPro, and I’m much less worried about my rMBP. There are three reasons for this: first, My MacPro has all of my family photos in Aperture libraries that are too big to go into Dropbox; second, everything on the rMBP is in Dropbox, thanks to Dropbox for Business’ ability to sign the app into a work account, and a personal account. I symlinked ~/Documents/ to ~/Dropbox (Under Armour)/Documents/, but I stil have access to my personal dropbox at ~/Dropbox (Personal)/. The only things that aren’t in there are my Downloads folder (which could be easily, and arguably should be), and my ~/Sites/ which I really only use for Cheaters and as a repository for various software and configs routers, switches, WAN Optimization devices, and can be discarded at will. ↩
Synology’s feature matrix is a bit of a mess, but eventually I decided that hot-swappable drives was a must, which took me up to the DS415, and adding the transcoder was an additional $60, so that made the cut, but each person’s needs are going to be a little different. ↩