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General purpose file storage

P

ptrubey

Well-known member
What do people here think about this potential feature enhancement:

That Kaleidescape create the ability for a segregated area to be used as a general purpose networked file system for local PCs. I personally would use this area to store my digital photos and other media. The nice thing about this for me is that the networked storage would automatically be protected by Kaleidescape's proprietary disk redundency system.
 
I think it would be great... but unlikely they'd do it. I think they'd find themselves in the tech support function then for novice PC users with strange storage/networking questions. that would be a nightmare for their customer support people.

And of course there are less expensive consumer NAS with RAID solutions that should do the same thing, albeit with less elegant redundance and expansion.
 
The problem with all RAID boxes that I've seen is that no one does any post sale customer support. All RAID systems (other than K) that I've seen require all drives in the RAID set to be identical, down to the internal platter configuration. So, 3 years down the road, a drive goes out - how the heck are you going to a) find out what kind of drive, exactly, you need, and b) find it. Oh and don't make the mistake of putting a different drive in by mistake, you may loose *all* your data.

Not that I'm bitter or anything...
 
An interesting idea to be sure, but I agree that Kaleidescape would not likely want to do this for reasons Josh said but more over I think a big deal to Kaleidescape is its closed status and I doubt they would want to even give the appearance that it was being opened up.
 
This Q came up from time to time. and it was a good potential one. for many of the possible clients, they are folks that may not have a massive network at home, so that ability to setup a backup utility and have it get access to .5 TB or so would be pretty cool. another guy from AVS Michael Grant siad that he liked that possibility because while he can definitely setup a raid, the monitoring aspect was what he really liked. so with all those valuable family photos and documents, not just having them protected but monitored could be very valuable.

THe requested feature list is always long at manufacturers... it is just a matter of figuring out the viability and then if that feature will make you money and then finding the engineering cycles to do it. The cool thing about K is that there are SO MANY possible add on features that the product can potentially continually reinvent itself.
 
Well, I hope they work on new areas of functionality rather than continually tweak what they already have. From a new customer point of view, it is a lot more impressive if they have movies, music AND PVR, or file share, or HD movies, or whatever rather than a list of tiertiary features...

At least they did give us music, that was nice.
 
I have an old mac tower which I loaded up with over 1TB of hard drive space and put it on my network. took just about all the software off it and I just back up data to it. I also have a few external firewire hard drives that I save data to and then I will take this data and put it on an office computer which has a lot of storage too.

Having access to photos via the K interface would be nice. I wish we could have access to itunes libraries but I do understand why that is not possible.
 
I have a large digital photo collection (maybe 15,000-20,000 photos)... I keep them all on a normal drive, but use the excellent Carbonite service for backups of EVERYTHING on my PC. It's unattended, idiot-proof service that is constantly backing up everything on your PC, no limits on sizes, all to their managed facility on the internet.

It runs in the background when your PC is idle... I have about 400gb total storage and it took it about 5-6 weeks (yes weeks) for the initial backup to be complete, but now it simply spends a few minutes late at night backing up extra files. The thing even protects you from accidentally deleted files, as the service waits about 4-5 weeks to remove its backups of files you've deleted from your PC.

The service is $5/month... for no limits on storage. amazing. very well done, easy software. Amazingly cheap, and of course cheaper than a RAID array, and let's remember, if your house burns down, having a RAID array next to your PC won't have done you any good. I love the peace of mind of having it offsite, professionally managed, and easily accessible from anywhere, any time.

www.carbonite.com

check it out, i have no affiliation with them other than as a happy customer.

--josh
 
We store all photo's on an external drive. Really scary. There is nothing out here in the non-k storage area that I trust anymore. Seen, or heard of, too many failures and it's a PITA to have someone recover the files, if they can even be recovered.

Jim
 
Hey Josh, i looked at that, seems cool. However i have a question... How the heck can they make money only charging 50$ a year? When i think of the cost of storage, or the data centre, of the services, it seems like they would be losing their shirts with that little of a charge.

Am i crazy?
 
It's probably one of those averages things whereby they bank on a certain percentage of users using more storage than what $50 a year should get you, some using less and most somewhere in the middle. Also, they could be using smart backup technology to only backup unique data that isn't already on their system. Microsoft's new Home Server does this by looking at bit level information on the drives it is backing up on each "client" machine. That way, you don't have duplicate copies of the exact same files for each client machine and thus save a ton of space.

They're also doing a few things to try and manage higher storage needs. From one of their FAQs:

"To keep users with very high speed Internet connections from hogging all our bandwidth and storage, we limit backups to .5GB per day once you have sent us 50GB of data. So if your initial backup is, say 40GB, it should run at full speed (2-3GB per day) until it is complete. If you add 1 GB of new data each day, after 10 days you'll have 50GB in your backup. After another 100 days, you'll have 100GB in your backup. There is no size limit. But you can only send us .5GB of new data each day once you have passed the 50GB threshold.

Carbonite will soon have a 'Power User' version that will allow full-speed backups of up to 200GB of data or more."

So, while the storage limit is still unlimited, the time required to backup larger systems will deter some of those users. I'd guess that the "Power User" version will be at a much higher price.

For people looking for good onsite backup solutions, I like what's coming later this year from both MS and Apple. Time Machine technology in Apple's upcoming Leopard OS looks very cool and includes the ability to backup to networked shares. It not only offers straight backups, but also includes multiple versions of saved files so you can go back to an old version of a single file if you need to. The trump card is the easy interface it uses to let you do that.

Vista offers that now with Shadow Copy. Later this year, Windows Home Server will offer a better networked backup solution for all Windows machines in the home. It's a smart, managed RAID NAS that isn't nearly as complex as a standard server box made to be used by home users.

Apple's Time Machine in Leopard:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/timemachine.html

MS Official Windows Home Server Blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/default.aspx

Jeff
 
This would be an awesome feature to add on, my reason as well is that i like the monitoring and replacement of drives in the raid.
 
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