[Leica] Tina's Drobos... Update: Handed over. Mission Success!

[Frank Filippone]

The project is done.  Tina now has a new, working library of her images 
on her NAS.  I have turned over the NAS to her to use as she see fit.  I 
will do the ongoing maintenance of it as required.

It is now organized into a simple to use seamless storage space of one 
big HDD. or so it looks to her.  All her images are stored by country 
and in alphabetic order.   This is in contrast to the before, when all 
the images were scattered in multiple HDD, and she woud install whatever 
HDD she needed to get to images form this or that country.  It is a 
massive step forwards.

The reason I am writing this is to warn you that it is not as easy as it 
looks... and that there are a lot of considerations to be made that are 
techie.... and some pitfalls...

It really is a straightforward operation...  Setup the new box, copy all 
files there, done.

The one thing I learned was that there are more considerations to be 
made, and you should think those through first, rather than in the 
middle of the conversion.  ( I will cop to the fact that the long time 
of doing this project was because I did not check out all the items 
needed, and needed to repeat several operations as I ran into dead ends.

How nerdy are you?  To run a NAS, and especially in this instance to 
MAINTAIN it..... will require a different pool of knowledge than the 
average home computer hack.  It runs differently.... it requires some 
different thinking....  NAS also has its own language.... (Nerd?)   Its 
own programs.  If you are not comfortable with that, get something 
different.... or get your IT person at work to help you....

If you have spare HDD you wish to include in your NAS, you should figure 
out the SMALLEST one... then install that one into the original array, 
and use SHR Raid array design. That allows you to use different HDD 
sizes and use all of the available space on each.... If you wait till 
you are done, then try to install the smaller HDD, it will not accept it 
as additional storage.  ( Larger, yes, smaller, NO)

Backup of the NAS.... the easiest way ( Synology based ) is to use 
Hyperbackup and an external HDD array.  ( means external USB HDD.)

So plug one into the NAS, setup the SW, and life is good.....

Until it is time to do your BackBlaze off site backup.... which will NOT 
WORK with NAS storage, even for the USB connected HDD you use for backup 
locally,  for their $99/year cheapie plan..... Off to Amazon to get a 
USB switch. It is a push button affair that switches your USB backups 
fro m the back side of your NAS to the Computer, which BackBlaze will 
accept.  When your BB backup is done, push the switch again, and back it 
goes to the NAS.  Not totally elegant, but it works. There is a more 
elegant automatic programmed solution, but that requires a $700 piece of 
hardware to replace the $20 switch. Plus some fairly esoteric 
programming and messing around with your computer.

NAS requires *wired Ethernet.*  There is really no way around this.  
There are a few cheats.... and caveats....This can be done using a 
simple wireless repeater (slows down the work, but is cheap and easy)  
or a wire, which is fast, but might mean tearing into the walls to run.  
If you have your computer already WIRED to the Internet, you could use 
an Ethernet switch box ($20) and also meet this requirement.

The only reasons to go to a NAS is if you are a computer geek and like 
to play with this stuff, you are in a real networked environment with 
multiple users ( read that as in an OFFICE environment), or you just 
have so many images or records and you need fast access to any one of 
them 24/7.

If it were me, and I had less developed computer knowledge, my best 
suggestion is to use a big, USB HDD array... up to 8 HDD in a  single 
box for around $300.

HDD extra.

And with that, I will no longer be telling you about Tina's NAS.  She 
appears happy.  That is all I wanted to accomplish.

Mission Success!

Frank Filippone BMWRed735i at gmail.com