Hi folks, I need some advice regarding storing & accessing video files. I run a business that sells video courses that teach people how to play musical instruments. We have an ever-increasing amount of video content that we need to store and access frequently, and it's getting to a point where we're outgrowing our current solution and need to put something better and more scalable in place.
Currently all raw footage is imported onto a Drobo 5D (15TB) for archival purposes.
Footage is then imported onto pairs of "live" and "backup" 3TB external HDDs. The live is used for editing the projects and then mirrored to the backup, which is stored offsite.
Our Drobo is nearly full, so we need to purchase something that can store our raw footage as we shoot more. Ideally this would be stored in one volume, so I'm considering replacing the Drobo with a Synology DS1817+ giving us 18 potential bays (with the two expansion devices) to store raw footage, but it's also inevitable that we'll outgrow this at some point. We don't have the luxury of having somewhere safe and enclosed enough for us to build big, noisy server units though.
What we don't have with the current solution is immediate and fast (MB/s) access to all of our live project drives. Would it make more sense to use the Synology DS1817+ as an archival drive & a live project drive, connected via 10GbE, and abandon the mirrored externals?
What I like about the current solution is that the Drobo is used as an offsite backup with redundancy, so if any of the "live" or "backup" external HDDs fail, raw footage is still kept. Project files are backed up to cloud storage. If the Synology were to replace the Drobo & use it for editing, we'd have to also find a practical way of backing this up offsite.
Keen to do the most sensible & scalable thing here. I estimate that we'll be generating a further 15-30TB of content in 2018.
Thanks for your time!
Hey, thanks for your reply. Keeping files on SDs is not an option as after 2-3 days of shooting they are full and need to be formatted to shoot more content. If we're keeping two units in sync via the Sync feature then presumably you're suggesting we get two DS1817s - one for live, one for backup. What's the best failsafe to protect against accidental deletions in that instance?