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Ask HN: Solution for storage requirements well behind Moore's Law

by jamiedumont on 11/28/23, 10:44 AM with 2 comments

I need to decide how I'll be storing my photos so that they are secure for the foreseeable. I've considered (and tried) most options, but I wanted to put the question to you lot because:

- I always find the debate on HN varied and interesting

- Various Reddit subs and forums have an obvious bias (TrueNAS, Synology, etc)

- Flaws in my thinking have been called out before on here - you lot aren't afraid to tell people they're wrong!

My situation:

- Pro-developer turned pro-photographer. I've got a good technical background to understand some of the solution.

- Currently have 1.5TB of images that I'm storing on an external 2TB SATA SSD (A1), mirrored (with SuperDuper) to another 2TB SSD (A2 - sent to a different location) and an external 2TB 2.5" HDD (A3) as fail-safe in a fire-proof box. A1 is also backed up to Backblaze B2 via Arq whenever it's connected.

- I cull image aggressively so growth in storage requirements has been slow until now (500GB p/a), but my work is increasing rapidly and with it the space I need (let's say 2 TB p/a as a worst case)

I'm going to hit the limits of this setup soon. Do I

A - buy another 2 SSDs and 1 HDD and continue the same setup (B1, B2 & B3)

B - replace this setup with larger SSDs and HDDs. (A1-3 but say 4TB?)

C - switch to HDD only and say use 3 external drives but @ 12TB+)

D - build/buy a NAS or DAS with RAID capabilities

When I finished development I repurposed my desktop as a TrueNAS (using the 2TB SATA SSDs from above) but it was obviously overkill (power & space requirements) for 2TB of storage only accessible via WiFi. I broke it down because of this and came up with the above setup. I'm not against building another NAS because I could automate much of my manual drive duplication, but I'll refit my home with ethernet beforehand!

I'll also likely be replacing my current M1 MacBook Pro (1TB) with a Mac Studio when the M3 models are released. Because my storage requirements are relatively low and well behind Moore's law (in a NAS context), I'm wondering whether it's better to take the money I'd spend on a NAS and drives and put it towards the expensive 8TB option with Arq backing up to B2. That would punt this decision down the road for a few years and leave me the option of building a NAS when I'm outgrowing the built-in storage on the Studio.

So...thoughts? Keep it simple with some more external SSDs or dive in with a NAS (most likely TrueNAS or ZFS on Linux)?

EDITED TO ADD:

E - do I just upload all the RAW images to B2 and let them do the hard work, and just keep the generated JPEGs locally?

  • by brudgers on 11/28/23, 3:34 PM

    [Random advice from the internet]

    Buy a printer, print the pictures, throw the prints in a shoebox.

    Then you can look at them and so can other people.

    You can buy a lot of ink for the price of a speced Studio Mac.

    And some nice shoes too.

    Good luck.