After talking with Casey today, I got inspired to look into rsync for some simple data mirroring of the photo archive.  Last year, I bought a dLink GSM-600 NAS for just that purpose.  It had Gig-E, albeit without jumbo packet support, and could take any ol’ PATA drive.  Cool.

So, I started looking at rsync, and trying to figure out how to get data to the NAS from the command line, thinking I would set up a cron job.  Well, come to figure out that the dLink doesn’t seem to support anything other than ftp from the command line.  Booooo.

That leaves me with dragging and dropping files onto the NAS until I can find a different solution.  I could pen a massive ftp script, maybe using rsync to figure out what’s changed and feeding that into ftp.  That’s not the greatest of ideas, although it would be automated and out of my hair.

Two hardware solutions present themselves.  One is a real NAS, with real Gig-E with jumbo packet support or perhaps connected via Firewire800 to the Quad.  The other is stick another SATA drive in the Quad, and just mirror the good stuff over to it.  I kinda like the idea of having RAID available, and while that’s doable in the Quad with a little extra hardware, having it external means that I can take it on the road if I need to.

However, NAS with RAID ain’t cheap.  It could be $600 easy for just the box, and then add some hard drives.  Slapping a SATA drive in the Quad is cheap insurance, and that may be the best short term answer, along with rsync to coordinate the copies.  The current photo archive size is 120Gb, and I’m sure I can get a 250Gb drive for under $100, which would house it with loads of growth potential.

Data storage and retrieval will be the bane of my existence!  🙂