Life in the cloud. Google that. You’ll find a lot of results for cloud storage, computing and a few things about Jesus. Let’s talk about the cloud. My iTunes library exceeds 2 terabytes. The size of my first laptop was 15 gigabytes. It was a 600Mhz iBook 12″ and, according to my buddy Dennis Sellers in his 2001 Macworld review of that iBook, “The iBook is touted as a consumer portable. But for lots of us professional users, it can also more than fill the bill.” LOL. 15 Gigabytes works for pros? 2001 was a different time. Back then, the iPod was 5 gigabytes and I used it was a backup FireWire drive as well as for holding my measly 500 songs in iTunes 2.0.1. Times have changed and today, my iTunes library is larger than the capacity of 160 iBooks or, about how many were in use at my high school for student labs and teachers when I graduated in 2004.
Apple has done a great job with media management. There’s iTunes Match for which I’m a subscriber that holds all 25,000 of my songs in the cloud. When I buy movies and TV shows on iTunes, those are accessible via the cloud anywhere. I can sign into my Apple account on any AppleTV or iTunes installation and via iOS (iPad / iPhone) and stream / download video and audio that I’ve purchased. That’s pretty awesome.
With DropBox, everything I need for work and personal projects is accessible via the web browner and iOS and it stays in sync across my devices without effort.
There are a lot of services that make locally storage completely useless. Flickr may have all of my best photos stored but my iPhoto library is 400 gigabytes. Not every great shot ends up on Flickr so I have to store that. Also, a lot of my iTunes media wasn’t purchased from Apple so there’s storing that as well. Finally, I maintain documents, presentations and multimedia going back to 1999 when I first started blogging, taking photos and turning in electronic copies of school work to my teachers using the printers and open WiFi we had in school.
In total, I’m storing about 4.5 terabytes of data and all of my hard drives were completely full. Not even a new movie could fit on them and I was at the point where I’d have to stop backing up my computers to external drives to make space for more media. I’m not a data hoarder, I just have a lot of data from over the years and getting new music, taking hundreds of photos a month (thousands while on trips) and recording various data points about myself really adds up.
I had the chance to attend Ultra Music Festival again this year but didn’t. I decided to pay some more bills off and re-do my home storage setup. I didn’t go NAS or RAID as I had hoped to do but I did double my storage capacity at home.
I have two LaCie D2 Quadra drives. Each had a 1 Terabyte capacity and one with a failing HDD. I ordered two 3-Terabyte SATA II drives from Western Digital (green line). Nothing fancy at about $180 per piece. Upgrading the LaCie drives was a breeze with some hex and phillips head screw drivers. This didn’t take long.
I also ordered a LaCie Blade Runner which is a 4 terabyte USB 3.0 drive designed by Philippe Starck and built by LaCie. Only 10,000 are being made but considering this drive has been on sale for 3 months (since CES) and experienced price drops, I don’t feel like they’re moving these too fast. It is a beautiful drive. I wanted to order a LaCie D2 with Thunderbolt and USB 3 at 4 Terabytes but ThunderBolt drives are still too expensive. The Blade Runner was $299 and the upgradeable drive with thunderbolt was $399 for the same capacity. Not something I wanted to spend. I’ll wait on a ThunderBolt drive for when I get a new iMac.
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It has taken about 36 hours but I’m finally back where I was a few years ago.
All 3 computers are duplicated with hourly backups to one of the 3 Terabyte drives. My iTunes Library is on one single drive (The Blade Runner) and duplicated to the other 3 terabyte drive. My 2 Terabyte Media Drive with life archives, projects and work is duplicated to the Blade Runner as well. I have some room to spare on all of these (about 3 Teraybtes Remaining).
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What has this whole experience taught me? Well, I still love hard drives and don’t trust the cloud. Also, since my Internet is near dial-up at the house, products that rely solely on the cloud won’t work for me. I can’t buy / rent movies on iTunes because they take 8 hours to download. I can’t backup my entire iMac to Mozy or another service because it would take close to 6 months to backup my iMac to an online place. Deleting all iTunes songs and streaming from iTunes Match won’t work. I can’t even stream Spotify or watch 640 YouTube videos so I need local storage. Local storage is still a requirement for me and will be for the foreseeable future.
Maybe I’m just getting old and don’t want to rely on online storage? My home Internet is weak but there’s something valuable about having my data stored at home and the ability to grab drives and take them with me in the event of a fire. A lot of things are stored online but these backup services come and go so I don’t really trust them.
This year, I still want to get a Thunderbolt iMac + 27″ Thunderbolt display and a proper set of desktop speakers. It’s quite a bit to spend at once but at least now my data is backed up and healthy again. I was tempting my fate by having thousands of important documents and photos resting on single drives, some which were 5 years old. All is good now and I’m breathing much easier.
