I am new to cloud storage. I am a photographer and currently have a desktop 2tb drive full and use 2tb Westerndigitial my books to back up. I keep one doing back ups and one off site and swap them out. In addition I have 2 other laptops in the house that need backup. I do have a wireless network operational in the house
I now need to expand my storage for photos. My thought was to get the EX4100. but should I add hard drive capacity to the desktop and then set up maybe 2ea 4 or 6tb drives in RAID 1 for back up of everything? I could then swap these two RAID drives in and out to keep one back up and one off site. that leaves me two slots for expansion. But what if anything should I do with my two 2TB MyBooks?
If it’ll help, this is what I do. I have three NASs and I’ve given a smaller NAS to my niece, but have access to my own area on it. Some stuff I back-up to my Niece’s NAS which is off-site. She does a back-up to my NAS.
I got two older NASs where I perform a back-up of some stuff to one and another to the other. The main NAS is RAID5. I also connect a external USB3 drive to my main NAS and schedule a job to back-up to that as needed.
What’s in everyone’s favour is that large capacity drives are becoming available (up to 4Tb in 2.5" form factor) and you’re a photographer, it’ll suit you as you’ll be storing your images in RAW format.
Your two MyBook drives can be used as back-ups to the EX4100 or maybe work drives? Where you use them for your work and when when ready back-up those to the EX4100? (I’m guessing this is something you may consider as USB2 or USB3 is faster than 100Mb Ethernet, unless you have at least a Gigabit local network.)
Thank you. That helps. I can’t do the offsite backup to another device because I do not have access to land based high speed internet. I have to use satellite and there are restrictions on data use. In fact one 16gig camera card worth of data blows my monthly allowance.
Most of what you said was backing up the EX4100. and I need that for my off site backups. Can I use Smartware or something similar to back up to the EX4100? I did not see that option on the software that comes with the unit.
