So, here I am. Part of my storage strategy these past three or so years was to have two 4TB drives hooked into the back of my iMac (which runs a 512GB SSD). I used one of those drives to house the data, and Carbon Copy Cloner made a complete dupe of it weekly to the other drive. Drive one and the SSD are also backed up via Backblaze. It all worked well until one of those drives (the dupe) started doing funny things a couple months ago, and now much to my dismay, strange things are happening on the first, too. Thankfully, I can still move files off of it, and so I’m being forced, with more speed than I’d actually like, to consider alternatives. And, over the past three years of this, I’ve got loads. In fact, here’s what I’ve picked up in that time:
- 2TB of iCloud storage with Apple One. (the main point of this to now was to house my expanding iPhoto library).
- 1TB of space thanks to Office 365 subscription.
- A Synology NAS system that currently houses all of my media, but has about 4TB of usable space that could be expanded to something like 16TB if I wanted to shell out for new hard disks.
So, given these options, I just wanted to toss out a few thoughts in case anyone had some thoughts in return about how to go about the next iteration of my storage odyssey. I don’t think I’ve ever done this particularly well. It’d be nice to get it right, and I have some time over the holidays.
So, there’s a couple things:
I like the idea of keeping things on iCloud, as it keeps me in the most seamless ecosystem, and the space is there, sorta. Here’s some issues:
Photos. The photos I have are stored in the cloud through iCloud photos. I also have a library which lives on the 4TB drive. It currently eats about 300GB in photos and videos. I’ve thought that this local copy was not strictly needed, given everything’s in the cloud, but I believe it was wise to keep a local copy, too. Given the size of the library, I can’t have it on the SSD, and I understand that having your Photos library on a NAS is frowned upon by Apple. So I’m a little at a loss about what to do with the local copy of the photos, short of buying another spinning drive to attach to the iMac.
Next are the files. I’m a little ashamed to admit I haven’t the foggiest how iCloud manages what’s in the cloud vs. what’s local. I could put most of my files on iCloud where they’d be quite happy, but if I did that, they’d need to initially be on the SSD, and there technically isn’t enough space there. My iCloud storage is four times the size of my local SSD, so I can hold the data, but I can’t hold it locally. So I’m not exactly sure how that works. Do I just keep hammering data onto the SSD until it’s full and iCloud drive takes over and somehow magically creates space on the local SSD that doesn’t exist? I assume I can’t house things on the NAS and have it back up to iCloud?
And speaking of the NAS, I’d move all the seldom used files (such as old Aperture data to the tune of nearly a TB) and all the rest to the NAS where’s locally backed up. But then, I really have no external backup, as Backblaze won’t backup the NAS. This is the biggest question mark. I feel mostly OK about what’s in iCloud as a secure place to house things offsite. But if I have Backblaze backup the local SSD, it won’t backup the files in iCloud assuming there’s more than 512GB. it’s all confusing.
Add to that the need to actually organize everything, but that’s an entirely different discussion. For now, I’m just not sure what the best way to go is. It seems silly to me to have any kind of external storage attached to the Mac given how much storage I have elsewhere, but there doesn’t seem to be a good way to do it so that it all works with photos, and is backed up with backblaze.
Thoughts?
Thanks in advance… this was a longer diatribe than I hoped it would be.
Maybe Apple will get there someday.