Hi Jeff,
that is an awesome setup :-) but it also should be a good indication to the rest of us, just how much is being put into guarding the Digital Assets, we work with daily.
I did a setup for a lady last year or so, where we do 2x back of all RAW files, on two different brand disks, a copy to the work station on a RAID-1, and then it gets backup to a sloooooooooooow Drobo, but she got cunned into buying one of these by one of the local Photog dealers. On top of that we do two backups of the WorkInProgress, which also reside on the Drobo and the RAID-1, these two backups are also stored remotely, and is done at the end of every day. These are all done with Craddles, and hard drives - a cheap backup solution, but never the less a backup that has worked and have saved her lots of money in the past year or so while this has been in effect.
Its not quite as elaborate as yours Jeff, but when the girls in the office follows the direction we always have 5 copies of a job, now this may be pushing it, but two of them are to ensure that the disks don't suddenly fail, as I think from memory the DeathStar IBM drives did several years ago...all just went like a time bumb.
In the main system and on the Drobo, I installed WD RE4 2TB, which at the time was the most reliable drives and with 5 yr warrenty, a compromise between cost, volume and speed. Medium cost level, high volume and medium level speed. I think it was the top tier, 7200rpm drives at the time, and only surpassed by the 15k in speed, but a signifigent decress in volume size too.
Thanks very much for sharing, its an impressive setup you got, one that we should all aspire to archive, if we want to protect our assets in a professionel enviroment.
Henrik
Well, I didn't tell the whole story now did I...while my main working drive is a 6 drive, 2 TB array zero setup, I have a duplicate 6 drive raid zero set up that is backed up to every nite...and I have a 3rd backup nighty to a Micronet raid 5 system (5x 3TB drives in a raid 5 setup) that gets a backup every nite from the second raid 0 setup. So, I actually have 2 raid zeros backed to the other and a raid 5 that also gets backed up every nite...so my system is 3x redundant...backed up nightly. I gave up on Drobos...