Which Drobo do you have, Drew?

If you have an Apple store nearby take the battery in,

I live in Iowa. I'd have to drive to another state to find one.

This "Civilized Discourse Construction Kit" looks interesting: [link]

I have the five bay Drobo FS I think. I'm in a theatre and not in the office right now.

No problem, I was just looking for a basic sense.

Hmm. Gotta assess my needs. I could maybe make the current NAS into a media server, and replace it with a more expandable NAS.

Do you keep optical copies of your clients' work, or do you hand them a hard drive and walk away? The SO doesn't want to start a pile of dvds or blurays or whatever that lives forever in the studio.

We opted for the 27" as per your recommendation, btw. It should get here on Saturday (ahead of schedule!)

I used to do optical storage but I gave up on that quite a few years ago. Since some of my projects can be a few hundred GB at a time, it is just too much.

My current backups run like this. Main project drive in the studio that is used for all of the actual recording and editing. a 4 TB Time Machine volume on the studio that is doing hourly backups. At the end of each day that I'm working in the studio the full project is copied to a NAS, and at times also to a pocket USB drive. When projects are completed they are archived to the Drobo. When I need to hand full things off to clients I do that using a pocket hard drive or a large flash drive. Lately I've been buying 32 and 64 GB jump drives and am loving that the 128 GB ones have falling prices.

Wait, so *is* your main project drive the 4TB Time machine volume? Or the Time Machine backs up your main project drive hourly?

My main project drive is currently a 1.5 TB Seagate I think. The Time Machine drive is a 4 TB LaCie I think. The Time Machine drive backs up the whole machine including the project drives hourly.

So, I have a backup on a hard drive using time machine. But if I don't keep it plugged to the laptop at least most of the time, it doesn't back up. So I figure if anyone breaks in to steal things, they'll take the backup too. What's the best way for me to (cheaply and easily) back up to something offsite? I worry about copying individual files or folders that I'd miss something big, which is why I super like the Time machine thing.

Ok, gotcha. So looking at that and the gear I have now, if I just added the Drobo or Gud's one, I could completely replicate what you're doing.

I would make the new 3TB USB the Time Machine. The SO's 1TB would be the working drive. The current NAS, the 2TB Linkstation once cleaned up, could be the daily backup. And the new anticipated NAS could be the long term completed project backup.

I think I'll still do optical (probably bluray) for the long term storage of the archival projects. I don't really need them at all, but I also don't want to just dump them. And I don't want to waste space on them. But then I'll move all the critical ones and my kids' ones onto the new NAS.

I'll have to look at Time Machine. I anticipate lots of new Mac user questions coming up. I mean, I haven't been on an Apple since they stopped production on the Apple Lisa. I was pretty good with Turtle at the time, but I hear they've moved on since then?