This afternoon I had decided to purchase not just one Drobo, but two. Yes two of the latest and greatest.

One as a direct attached FW800 connected device, the other was the Networked Attached Storage (NAS) device running over my gigabit ethernet network. That was the easy part. Parting with my cold hard earned cash was easy compared to what was install for me later on.

Drobo, for me, to date, was a fairly easy device to get running. The old trusty device which included a share was working fine. But the biggest complaint was the speed. And it was terrible. So slow in fact that some applications that I was using even timed out and through up errors. Terrible experience. This time around I was looking for speed to backup across my network.

Following the instructions was straight forward. Pop some disks into the slots and you are off and running. Well so I thought. That where it went…

I am so paranoid about loss of data. And when you have more than 700GB of images in 1 Lightroom catalogue then it becomes obvious that you must keep things running.

Not to set my requirments bar too high, I set to find what was avalaible to me. So I put my IT thinking cap on and thought about several possibilities that could work for me. This is what I prioritised my requirements;

Speed - I have to be able to get access to my images in a flash

Localised restores – something that is close by so I can get to it quickly

Off-site – this is paramount to a full disaster recovery solution

Up-to-date - keep my portable laptop sync’ed with all the business and ensure all documents…

I’m the one usually giving advise around technology – not this time.

I’ve succumbed to the an evil hard drive failure. Most of the folks that read this and know me by now would be saying “you do have a backup right?” The answer to the question is ashamedly, No.

Well, let me take you back a little as the answer to that several weeks ago was Yes. So what happened between now and then? Answer, my switch from Apple Aperture to Adobe Lightroom. Not that they effected the backups per say. However I never instigated my backup strategy after the move to Lightroom.

As a passionate digital photographer, I had pledged to figure out my storage solution in 2008. Prior to the Drobo, I had purchased an enclosure that had 2×500 GB hard drives. I was storing big Raw files and my Time Machine. I decided that I wanted to separate my photography data from the rest of my stuff. And if I could find…