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HP MediaSmart Servers Now Compatible with Your Mac
For as long as I have been shooting digitally, I have been trying to come up with a good solution for centralizing the storage of my RAW images files, and making sure they are safely backed up.
If you have been following this blog for a while now you will probably recall a number of articles I have posted on this very topic. One of the main issues has always been that I work mainly from my laptop. I travel pretty often, and I am rarely sitting at my desk in my office. These days I have found myself spending time in my studio at school, my apartment in Baltimore, my girlfriends apartment in Brooklyn, and any number of coffee shops in between.
I cary my laptop everywhere I go along with a couple of portable hard drives and my cameras. My girlfriend is in a similar situation, and although she doesn’t travel nearly as much, she works exclusively from her laptop. She too has a portable external drive where she stores her movie files and RAW photos from her digital camera. In addition to her photos and movies she also maintains a pretty large iTunes music library on her machine.
Making sure all of this data, strewn about on hard drives and laptops all over the place has become a real nightmare. I have tried several backup techniques, some of which have worked better than others, and while many of these accomplish certain tasks, they have never really worked together to create a real solid and robust solution. In the end, the issue always comes down to automation. If the system isn’t 100% automated, it basically won’t work 99% of the time.
So lately I have been considering building a custom media server for our apartment in Brooklyn. This was originally going to consist of an older Man Mini and a RAID pair external drive from Western Digital. I had planned to set this up in the small Brooklyn apartment, and administer it via Back To My Mac from wherever I am on my laptop. The idea was that we would store all of our media files on the RAID drive, and the Mini would take care of automating backups to a site like Amazon S3, or perhaps and backup service like Mozy. It sounded pretty nice, but it also sounded like a bit of work to get it up and running. Additionally it really didn’t offer me much more than another computer and hard drive to watch over. In other words, I would still be responsible for making sure things got done the way I wanted them.
Then I read about the HP MediaSmart Server. At this year’s Macworld conference HP announced that its latest MediaSmart Servers would in fact support Macs as well. Yes I know, it’s still a PC, but check out what it can do!
The HP MediaSmart Server has 4 drive bays and allows mirrored RAID. You can set it up on your network ( requires a PC to get things started ) and it can be used as a Time Machine backup location. You can also store all of your movie files, pictures, and even your iTunes library. The server has the ability to automatically backup everything to Amazon S3, and it also offers a web access service where you can log in and see all of your files from any web browser on the Internet. As a centralized storage center for your iTunes library, you can use it to play iTunes music from any machine in the house. They also offer some streaming capabilities over the Internet, but I haven’t really read how that works yet. In addition to its 4 drive bays you can attach an external drive via FireWire or USB ( can you say Drobo?). All in all it looks really promising. Apple has been rumored to have something like this in the works, and I hope they do. But, until then, the HP MediaSmart Servers seem like a great solution.
The base model comes with a single 750 Gig drive for $599, or you can upgrade to dual 750 gig drives for $750. For more info check out their website here.
Hi Micah,
I was in a similar position to find a secure RAID system and initially looked into the Drobo. However, I also wanted to easily share it over the network and have a storage space for our DVD copies (AppleTV), so I settled for the 4 TB WD ShareSpace. It comes ready formatted as a RAID-5 (giving you 2.7 TB usable "secure" space), and came in significantly cheaper than a loaded Drobo. On Amazon.co.uk they go for about 570 GBP, incl. all four 1 TB drives. I like the S3 automated backup, I use Interarchy for that at the moment, have to look into whether the ShareSpace can do that. The units seem quite similar otherwise. :-)
WARNING! WARNING!
After checking the details, I find myself continually disappointed. This server, like all Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, is still unsupported by Time Machine. The HP whitepaper merely says that if Apple ever decides to allow an SMB server to be compatible with Time Machine, then this device will work.
I tried hooking up my 1.5TB LaCie 2bigNetwork drive last night, and ran into this problem. This forum provided a way to at least have the mounted NAS show up on the list of places you can back up Time Machine to:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8703821
but as my post shows, I can't seem to make it work. It doesn't seem to matter if it's the SMB server or APS server, Time Machine doesn't like NAS drives. The same seems to go with Aperture Vault backup.
I'm really hoping Apple gets their collective but in gear/act together and starts supporting NAS devices with their software. More and more people are using NAS devices for shared media storage and regular backups.
@Daniel: Thanks for the info. Are you talking about the newly announced at Macworld system, or the older model? They claim it works just fine for TM, and that in fact there is a special "Mac Setup" page in the prefs page.
Anyway, for what it's worth, I read some reviews about this unit, and while it sounds really appealing for certain reasons, I am now considering making my own server on a Mac Mini, either with Leopard Server or perhaps Ubuntu Linux. Still doing research though! Remote Time Machine possibilities sound appealing...
I run a consulting firm, based on Linux, and run Apple gear at home. Backup is a huge concern for me and my clients.
Solutions I have settled on are varied.
1. My servers use rsync much like Apple's time machine works: nightly snapshots, kept for a month, with monthly snapshots until I run out of space. (Although I leave a 20gb buffer rather than let it go to zero like time machine.)
2. My laptop at work uses Time Machine to a local USB drive.
3. My desktop at home has a Time Capsule under the desk, and I occasionally bring the USB drive from work to accomplish offsite backups (copy my home Time Capsule onto the USB drive, copy a USB drive file onto the Time Capsule).
Backup isn't easy.
I guess I was talking about the older model. When this was first announced almost a week ago, their web page said the supported Time Machine only if Apple ever started supporting NAS drives. At least, that was the hidden disclaimer. Now they've changed the page. I guess they've found a way to trick Time Machine Preferences into letting you back up to there. Perhaps it'll work for Aperture vault backup as well. If you want to try it, please make a post to let us know how it goes.
If you and your gf want to put more space on your laptops for taking your libraries with you, you might want to check into MCE's optibay:
http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/
I stuck an extra 250GB in my old Powerbook, so I won't have to worry about a managed Aperture library for quite some time...
I bought the Drobo as a Time Machine backup for my MacPro in my home office. I have a 1-terabyte main drive in my MacPro that contains all my software and files (personal and business). I wanted a 2-TB drive for Time Machine. The Drobo does that very easily with 4 drives, each 750gb. The ease of management is what convinced me. i do not want to have to match drives or deal with the complex issues involved with RAID.
I also have another 1-TB drive in the MacPro which i use to clone my main drive every night with SuperDuper.
I added a 500gb drive to my MacBkPro15 and carry a password protected Data Locker 2.5 hard drive as a backup. It is the best secured hard drive I have found. I have tried others that use a physical plug in device, but the failure rate has been very high
I have an iMac with a 1TB drive and two Mac notebooks each with 250GB drives. I am using a Firewire 800 Drobo for backup, and it is working great. I have 4 drives in the Drobo for a total of 3.25TB. For each of my Macs, I am doing a Time Machine backup plus a SuperDuper image. I have another set of this data archived off-site.
I would strongly recommend the Drobo for ease of use and functionality.
@Len: I agree with most parts, but keep in mind that when you change/upgrade drives in the Drobo that can take a lot of time. Also, buying a Drobo Box and fitting 4x 1TB drives in it is more expensive than the ShareSpace for example. But of course one has FW800 (better and faster for a single machine), one has NAS features - neither may be perfect depending on what you want to do).
@Dudley: If you've got 3.25 TB in your Drobo, you must be using the 1.5 TB drives? Or are you using it without redundancy, i.e. JBOD mode or similar?
I have two 1TB drives, one 750MB drive, and one 500MB drive in my Drobo. Although these add up to 3.25TB, I have 2.0TB that is usable data space. Backing up the 3 Macs as I described has used approx. 60% of the space. One of the nice features of the Drobo is that you can mix and match drives. Two of the drives I am now using were originally in external enclosures. The new drives I am using are Western Digital Green drives. The 1TB version is now available for $104. Another advantage is that you can upgrade as the cost for drives goes down.