Hello, I was wondering if I outline my current situation perhaps someone out there - who like me, doesn’t have a life - could provide some network planning guidance? 
Bottom line is I’ve heaps of family photos, home videos, iTunes and (limited) non-iTunes media on a Drobo S hooked up to an old iMac via a USB 2.0 connection… so it’s slow… and I have no back-up solution.
I want to move all my iTunes (and currently limited non-iTunes) media to a dedicated media server hooked up to the Television and HiFi via HDMI or USB or Optical to eliminate existing WiFi dropouts from streaming via the old iMac. My Apple TV is currently connected to the Television via HDMI, but needs WiFi to access and stream files from a Drobo connected to my old iMac. I’m weary of booting up the desktop iMac to be an unreliable media streaming device - unreliable due to the WiFi dropouts I mentioned plus being occasionally bumped off the network for some reason.
I intend to attach an external drive (probably a Drobo) to my home network hub - an Air Port Extreme - and I’m hoping to set up a nightly back-up of data from the different locations - the iTunes media files in the lounge room and the photos and home videos in the study. I’m hoping Time Machine can coordinate backing up from different devices in different physical locations on the home network.
I don’t know if it will be necessary to employ software-specific back-up strategies provide in Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom or Phase One’s Capture One Pro. This might be leading off to another issue as I’m undecided which photo management tool I should settle on as I need something good at managing video files too (Capture One, Lightroom or Photo Mechanic maybe?).
Hello, I have a Drobo N and a Drobo S and a need to centralise the storage, retrieval and back-up of about 8TB (and growing) of photo and video libraries and iTunes media. (This 8TB of data needs to be trimmed as there is a lot of duplication and junk I need to deal with, but that’s another issue).
My Apple Time Capsule at only 1TB is no longer sufficient back-up and I am replacing it with an Airport Extreme plus maybe one of my existing Drobo units. Maybe getting a Drobo as a backup unit is a bit over the top for a home user.
My existing Drobo S failed - possibly due to a drive failure while I was already replacing one of the other drives in the Drobo S unit, which was in the rebuilding process.
As I did not have a full back-up system in place, I just bought a Drobo 5N and connected it to the Ethernet port of my iMac to enable me to copy the content of the Drobo S to the Drobo 5N before I reset the Drobo S and remove a suspected faulty Drive 02. Drive 02 is faulty according to a Diagnostic Log Drobo Support looked at for me.
It took all night to copy the first 535GB Aperture Library file so it might take a week to move all 8TB.
Which of my two existing Drobo units should I ultimately connect to the Apple Air Port Extreme?
Which should I connect to a Mac Mini Media server?
Thank you.