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Alas, No Aperture on my Drobo
I'm feeling fairly good about my archiving strategy these days... in a hackish, workaround sort of way. I have hard drives scattered all over Northern California that provide offsite redundancy for my Aperture Libraries. But I also want an easily-accessible database with all my master photos. I recently discovered Drobo - a fully automated SATA robotic storage array - and started scheming on how I could add it to my archiving strategy. Drobo manages up to four SATA drives providing constant monitoring and backup. It's fairly nifty, and you can read all about my experiences with it in the article, Drobo Hard Drive Back Up for Photographers.
I have my Drobo on an AirPort Extreme network receiving master files right off the camera's memory card. I keep track of everything on the drive with Microsoft's Expression Media. Since the Drobo is a network drive, I can access it from any logged-on computer, giving me lots of versatility.
At this point you may be thinking, "Dude, this is an Aperture site. What's the deal with this other software?" And I'd reply: "I hear ya!" Because if I were boss of the world, I'd also be using the Drobo for my Aperture Vaults. But as we all know, you can't write to a Vault on a network drive.
So for now, it's Memory Card > AirPort Extreme > Drobo for the backup of my images right off the memory card. And then Memory Card > Aperture > FireWire Drive(s) for my working files. Not terrible and not perfect. You might be now thinking, "Hey, just put your masters on Drobo and access them as referenced files in Aperture. Problem solved!" Yeah, except there's this nagging performance issue. Working in Aperture is resource intensive enough without putting 802.11n and USB 2.0 between me and my images. So for now, it's going to have to be two parallel archiving workflows.
This leads me to a couple of questions. First, what do you think about Drobo? Second, what hackish workflows have you come up with to keep your images safe and sound while still enjoying the power and ease of Aperture? Let me know
.
I have the same drobo setup. I have the Drobo hanging off the Airport Extreme Base Station and I put all my masters on it. The difference is that I use those directly in Aperture.
It isn't too bad because the previews are all local on my MacBook Pro. But, generally, the performance of this setup sucks. I'm pretty sure it is the AEBS. I get like 10x better speed connecting the Drobo directly to the computer. And, obviously, the network speed is fast enough.
I've been thinking I might get much better performance if I hook up the Drobo to a Mac Mini and leave that hanging off the network. I'm wondering if anyone else has some experience they can add...
--t
I copy my photos from the sd card to my local hard drive and work on them in Aperture where they stay until I need space or the year is up and they get moved to an external drive which is also managed with Aperture.
The external drive is backed up nightly with SuperDuper as is my local drive. The local drive is backed up with Time Machine as well. My most recent and active photos are in three places so I am pretty secure.
I am also rotating the SuperDuper backup drives off site to my office monthly in case the house burns down.
You can setup a network vault in a kind of hacky way by using disk utility to create a sparse disk image on your drobo on the network. Then, whenever you want to backup your aperture library using a vault, you just have to load your disk image and hit the update vault button.
Rumor has it that Flickr pro will start accepting RAW very shortly. (Last week they added video, tho it's limited to 90 sec / 150MB):
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/04/flickr-adds-vid.html
I'm not suer why the Drobo is getting so much press lately, when the Infrant ReadyNAS line of products have done everything the Drobo does and much more for years.
The ReadyNAS's all have gigabit Ethernet, and when you have Jumbo frames enabled you can get transfer speeds up to 17-24 mb/s range over AFP. I have successfully captured DV video to mine... If you are looking for better speed check out http://www.readynas.com.
ps.
there is even a feature to connect card readers to the ReadyNAs and have images automatically archived.
I have Drobo connected directly to my MBP. I store all referenced files on it. I rarely run in to speed problems with the device (or so I'm assuming). I've talked with several photogs that have the same setup and none have had any problems with Drobo (and USB 2.0). it's actually quite fast.
Yes, there is a big performance difference between a direct connection and 802.11. But I really want a network drive. So I live with the compromise.
> christopher said:
> the Infrant ReadyNAS line of products have done
> everything the Drobo does and much more for years.
As anyone who has used both ReadyNAS and Drobo will tell you, you should do a bit more research before making silly statements like the above. The Drobo is quite disappointing in terms of interface speed, but that's not what's revolutionary about the technology.
Hi,
my setup includes a maxtor shared storage II NAS connected to a gigabit ethernet switch (no wifi); every now and then I consolidate my master files to the NAS as referenced files and free up space from my MBP internal disk; I think the speed is acceptable. The NAS has its own (internal) backup software to a second external USB2 drive (Maxtor Basic storage) connected directly to the NAS, so no need to leave the PC on or use cpu cycles for copying stuff between external drives. Both drives auto powers off after 10-15 minutes so I don't need to shutdown and they automatically become available when needed. I think this configuration answer all my needs, at least for now, but I'm not a professional photographer.
Nico.
Don: What makes the Drobo "revolutionary" over ReadyNAS?
I also have a readynas and one of the main advantages is that is a NAS and with drobo you need to connect it to a USB port. I felt that drobo was a black box and felt more comfortable with raid technology which I understand better. My performance is very good.
I was considering a Drobo for a long time, but the performance issues and the fact that they use a proprietary OS to drive it make me a bit weary.
I keep my current workload on my MBP. I archive a year's worth of projects on a FW800 external RAID; anything previous is backed up to DVD as Aperture projects.
I'd love to have an off-site storage for RAW files (I'd support Flickr in a big way on this one) and/or network vaults.
I'd even pay Apple $100 a year for an Aperture-only network archive, or something. C'mon, Apple.
I'm using Lightroom and not Aperature, but I imagine our goals are the same. I bought a FW800 Drobo last year (not the USB 2.0) version to use as main storage for terrabytes of photos and it's quite slick (and fast). It replaced a rather loud and large Debian Linux six-disk RAID array I was getting tired of maintaining.
I am using Drobo as my main storage disk - FW800 - on my Mac Pro with Aperture and 600GB of Photos.
It works fantastic. Those people that have compared ReadyNAS with Drobo really don't know what Drobo is all about. Firstly - Drobo is not NAS (true you can buy a NAS to go with it called Drobo Share) and secondly it is truely automatic. Complete RAID 5 like redundancy only non-equal drive sizes. Live replacing or upgrading of disks. No partition resize ever necessary. Really go to the site and do research first !
As for performance though. I am not sure yet. Some times the Drobo seems faster than single disks - which makes sense just on a split across drives. Other times I have issues with performance.
Is it faster or slower on Aperture. I have not had enough time to try both. It seems very fast, but maybe a local disk, or even a Raid 0 disk (split, the opposite to redundancy - but much faster than a single drive) would be a better choice, with regular Vaults to the Drobo.
Scott
Is there a compelling reason not to just use the Option+Aperture open trick, and create a new library on a NAS?
I've done this for a few days and seems to be working well. I have (4) 1 TB drives in a RAID5 configuration with dual gigE links to my gigE switch. I simply connect to the NAS via Finder while my MacBook Pro is connected to the network via gigE, and select the library upon Aperture's opening.
Obviously, performance is lower than a directly connected disk, but not bad over gigE...
What do you guys think? Is there something I haven't considered?
Here is my archiving workflow.
Using a MacBook Pro and shoot 5 days a week as a photojournalist. So I can't download to the local drive. Download from flash card to firewire drive with a "working" aperture library. All images are referenced. As soon as they are downloaded to the "working" disk I copy to an "archive" Western Digital ShareSpace NAS. For some reason I CAN put an Aperture library on the NAS. It is very slow, but it works.
Work on the images in the "working" firewire Aperture library. One a week I export projects from the working library on the firewire drive WITHOUT consolidating images. After the week's projects have been exported I shut down Aperture and open the "archive" library on the NAS drive. Import projects and then reconnect the images.
It is kind of convoluted and round-about, but it works. I can do some work on images located on the "archive" NAS but it is frustratingly slow.