Storage and back up

Hi All

I need some advice about storage and back ups.

This is my scenario. At home I have 4 macs (an early 2009 mac pro running 10.7, a 2008 Macbook pro also running 10.7, a 2006 mac mini with 10.5 and a 2004 Powerbook running 10.5).

At the moment i am storing files on each of the macs hdds and also each mac has external disks attached. The Macpro has all of its drive bays filled.

My iTunes library is shared via a hdd attached to an APE.

After recently deleting files I no longer required I still have nearly 6TB of data on the various macs, consisting of documents, photos, films and music.

I'd like to consolidate all this data on to as few devices as possible and am looking for some advice on what my options are within a reasonable budget. The 6TB of data is all essential so I am also thinking about longer-term and secure backups of it. There must also be room for growth!

Don't know that there is any such thing within a reasonable budget to backup 6TB of data and provide room for growth.

Just spent a few months trying to figure out what to do when my windows home server died on me with about 6TB of data on it. I have 2 macs (will be 3 by the end of the week) and a win 7 machine. And they all also have their own backups.

Looked long and hard at the NAS devices out there and the Drobo seemed to be the way to go, but just couldn't bring myself to spend that sort of money.

Ended up getting one of the NewerTech Guardian Maximus RAID1 devices from OWC - $129 - just got it up and running last weekend - stuck two of my 1.5 TB drives in it and will be testing it out over the next couple of weeks.

After my experience, now I'm concerned about having some 4-6 disk RAID device die on me and having data on a bunch of drives that is unrecoverable without that device. At least with the RAID1, I can pull those drives out and they're each still readable as stand alone drives.

My only issue right now with this NewerTech is that it takes it about a minute to wake up when you try to access it after it's gone to sleep. I think I can deal with that - maybe - because it is going to house my movie/music collection. If I like this one - I'll be getting 1 or 2 more of these. Since you've got all Macs there, you could daisy chain them on FW800. And I believe they were advertising you can put the new 3TB drives in them. If that's the case, for $260 plus the drives, you could have all 6TB backed up in RAID1.

The Drobo FS looks like it will do what I need. Looks like it will support 3TB drives and with 5 drive bays I'll get the extra space i need..

Thanks for the pointer.

That's the one I would have gotten if I could have brought myself to spend the cash for it. Just couldn't do it right now.