A Really Stupid PC to Mac Question?

Bear with me

This is going to sound really stupid but I'd rather ask than cock it up.

I currently have a Windows setup, including my desktop PC, a latop for the wife and a netbook for when I am out and about. There is also a Linksys Media Hub that holds all my music and some backups of photo's, etc.

This week, whilst consolidating my photos onto a bigger drive, the 1tb drive that was temporarily holding ALL my photos crashed. Its currently at a data recovery company to try and recover them. This has made me think about a proper backup solution. First off, I've signed up to Carbonite for storage of all the important stuff online\offline, whatever the term is, but I also need a multi-disk NAS setup for storage and recover, so looking at a Drobo FS. And for immediate backups of each project, an external blu-ray writer.

Now, of course, this will all be accessed by Windows machines but I am thinking of converting within the next 12 to 18 months to a Mac. So here comes the stupid question..........

Will I still be able to read\write files to the NAS and also use the same external blu-ray writer with an iMac?

Thanks in advance

I'd double-check with Drobo, but generally speaking, provided the NAS is formatted as NTFS you should be able to read out of the box with OS X. To write to it you'll need the freeware MacFUSE and NTFS-3g utilities. For the Blu-ray drive, you'll be able to read discs, but not play Blu-ray movies from it as OS X does not support Blu-ray disc playback. To write to it you'll need appropriate software, such as Toast.

I have to agree that this matches my experience.

I have a Win 7 / Mac OSX Hackintosh on dual boot and under OSX I can see and read from all of the installed NTFS hard drives including my Windows OS and all data drives but cannot write to any of the NTFS drives.

Under Windows the PC does not even recognise the OSX formatted disc.

Shouldn't be much of a problem. Just a few minor 'new' things to learn when you make the switch.

As the others allude to, how you proceed will mostly depend on how you set up the file system w/ the Drobo. Even though Drobo can use the older FAT32 file system, chances are you will be using the NTFS file system to backup your stuff in a Windows-oriented NAS box. In that case, the Mac OS will be able to natively *read* all your NTFS data...but you won't be able to *write* to that NAS system without some additional software.

Tony went the 'free' route using MacFUSE/NTFS-3g. I use Paragon's software on my Macbook for work all the time, which is easier to set up but costs $20. I backup all of my work's Mac stuff on my NTFS home server (as well as cloud), and I don't have any problems at all.

Cheers for the advise guys. I would have formatted as NTFS so its just a case of getting the extra software when it happens.

I thought the drobo had its own file system, but maybe you format it ntfs over the top. Best let it use what it wants to, really.

Don't forget offsite backups, just an external 2TB hard drive should do. I don't bother with optical media, they're too much trouble to burn and store them all.

Oh and drobo isn't the only game in town. Buffalo, Linksys, etc, all have good products for reasonable prices.

I wouldn't use any specific vendor's backup program. That is bound to be trouble as you change platforms, upgrade or they go out of business.

If you are proficient with computers I'd build something around rsync on my own. That solution will stay with you for the rest of your life, nobody can stop supporting anything there.

HP makes a mediasmart brand server that runs Windows Home Server. Amazingly easy to set up and administrate. Out of the box it worked with Windows XP(Need a Windows install of some sort to do the first configuration and to access the the server via the console. You can remote desktop in too), Windows Vista, Windows 7, OS X, and my PS3. These are all operating systems and consoles that I've personally used with it.

I currently have 3 drives for 2.75TB of storage. What WHS does currently is add all drives to a pool instead of assigning letters. You can choose shares or drives to duplicate (if more than one drive is installed) and WHS will duplicate your folders across multiple drives to protect against data loss if a drive were to crash.

HP's WHS install is supposed to work with time machine (the option is there, I just prefer to clone my drives and backup my files manually) and can schedule automatic backups for all Windows computers on the network.

I also rip all my movies to the server and stream them to my PS3 rather than having cases and physical media laying around everywhere.

It also allows you to backup server content to external drives so you can store files off site for a true backup solution.

All in all, it's probably one of the best investments I've made to date.

Unfortunately, MS is supposed to be getting rid of the drive pooling ability with the new version of WHS when it's released and will go back to a drive letter scheme.