New lenses and cameras are always fun to purchase, but equally important is finding a way to store those photos you’re making with those cameras and lenses. Here’s why you should consider network attached storage before you spend that money on another lens.
I get it — cameras are sexy and hard drives are not, but network attached storage is much more than just a simple hard drive to store your photos on. I started using a NAS unit that uses Synology’s DSM (Disk Station Manager) a couple of years ago and it was life-changing. Instead of shuffling around external hard disks and waiting forever to make backups of backups, I had a much more reliable option that gave me a lot more flexibility to store and retrieve my photos.
Reason 1: Flexibility
With standard external hard drives, I’m limited to what I can physically plug into my computer at all times. The beauty of a network attached storage unit, such as Synology’s DS718+ or DS1618+ is the network part. Instead of plugging directly into a computer, which would need to be powered on to access files, I’m plugged into my router with a Cat 6 cable. I can then access the NAS unit directly on my home network by plugging into the same router or connecting to my wireless network. I can even access my files remotely though the DSM interface. I can’t count the number of times I’ve needed to grab an old file on the road and a NAS unit with Synology’s DSM lets me do that with ease. I’m also able to use any computer or laptop in the house without having to physically plug in or unplug drives.
When I’m transferring a massive amount of files, I can plug things directly into the NAS, set up the transfer through the DSM web interface, and walk away without worrying about my computer losing power or going to sleep and interrupting the transfer. It requires much less thought and effort.
Reason 2: Expandability
Before switching to a 2-bay NAS Unit, I would buy increasingly larger hard drives until I was hitting the limit of what’s possible in a standard external drive (which was about 10 TB when I switched over). That’s a lot of data to carry around on one platter, but more than this, it took forever to back up that drive, even with a fast USB 3.1 connection. I also finally hit a point where I hit the limit and couldn’t even fit everything on one drive anymore.
The DS718+ out of the box supports 2 hard drives (but with the DX517 expansion unit, it can go to 7) and the DS1618+ supports 6 out of the box. Depending on your needs, you can configure for maximum storage (in my case, I have 2 12TB Seagate Iron Wolf drives set up to give me 24TB) or for redundancy in case one drive fails. While this redundancy shouldn’t necessarily be considered a backup, Synology’s DSM makes it easy to seamlessly sync to another NAS Unit offsite or the cloud using Hyper Backup to offer a true backup solution.
All in all, it’s much easier than having multiple hard drives and having to separate which files are on what, and then backing that all up to another set of hard drives.
Trading in a pile of hard drives and flash drives for a NAS unit made life a lot more organized.
Reason 3: Hard Drives Will Fail
When you put all your eggs in one basket, you are destined to lose or break that basket. Using a NAS gives important peace of mind for photographers always worried about calamity striking their photos. A common saying among IT professionals is that there are two types of people: Those who have had a hard drive failure and those who will have a hard drive failure.
Even if a NAS is the main unit or secondary unit in a backup system that includes hard drives, it’s a valuable upgrade.
Giveaway
If you’re looking to get your hands on a unit yourself, Fstoppers is giving away a Synology DS718+ with two 14TB Seagate drives. Just leave a comment about something you wouldn't want to lose in a hard drive crash, and you will automatically be entered in the draw.
This giveaway is open those with a US address. Winners will be selected in one week.
I would just die if I lost all of my epic cat videos....and videos of my kids I guess.
Years and years of family photos.
Losing any photos would be a disaster, losing photos of your loved ones would by far be the worse for me.
I wouldn't want to lose any of my photos, nas seems like a good idea.
losing years of family photos and videos, especially of those who are no longer here, would be devastating.
All my digital pictures and documents
I wouldn't want to loose any of my travel photos.
my mind... don't want to lose my mind...
I wouldn't want to lose any of my photos, especially my landscape photos
When I in my wife lost a practically new 2tb hd with various jobs we almost went crazy. Today we make hand copies of all work in 2 hds and it takes time and sometimes it is confusing to know if everything really is ok. In addition to hand testing of each hd individually. Very tiring and nothing efficient. So we can not miss several photo shoots and thousands of hours of work on treatments and corrections. Thanks!
I have a Synology NAS so I hope someone else wins it. It's great. Be sure to use it in conjunction with another backup system though in order to have a proper backup solution. A NAS along with a cloud service is almost perfect.
My Dad and I went to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks last fall. He had traveled a great deal throughout his life but had never been to Yellowstone, despite a love of history and the outdoors. I took a number of photos of him. None are amazing, but he died of complications related to pneumonia in July so they are the last I have.
20 years+ of images, video, documents, emails. My life is documented in these files.
Wow, will this have the most comments of anything on Fstoppers ever?
I wouldn't want to lose my niece and nephew's childhood photos. I would no longer be the cool uncle if I did.
Private cloud sounds cool.
Even though I use Carbonite (highly recommend), I still like to have a local backup. Also, a local backup with tons of storage space enables me to keep files I would normally delete in order to conserve precious SSD space.
I have a lot of photos of my family and espescially people that have passed. They are not replaceable. I am also a pro tog and I have lost pics in the past. This is a bad experience and I think this solution would prevent the end this sad event from ever happening again.
I was about to buy a 4 bay Synology, I've used them before and I do like how simple they are to set up. However they are very expensive for what you get.
In the end I just build my own server (6 bays and space for a couple of SSD's) without the HDD's it cost me about £170 and it a lot more powerful than any of synology's offerings, their cheapest 6 bay is around £829 without drives.
This website is a really useful resource for getting started. https://www.serverbuilds.net/
My children. Really. I keep them in my NAS.
Photos from my wedding, I would be very sad to lose those
I wouldn’t want to lose the last 20 years of my digital photography and past 7 years of videography. It would be devastating. I have lost photos in the past from failed hard drives and it’s tough. Not everything was able to be recovered. Live and learn I suppose
I absolutely would not want to loose my mind because all the pictures of our new born baby were gone...
Just shot my first commercial job in a new city I moved to. Would hate to lose such a milestone! Also, this is right on time, as I was just researching how a NAS system would totally change my workflow!
I already know the pain of loosing images. I lost about 6 months of images which includes some vacation images .
There is nothing worse than that sinking feeling of loss when it comes to digital media. Scanned film, one has at least the negatives. Digital pictures and video, there is no "hard copy". To lose pictures of my friends and family would be the worst.
I wouldn't want to lose images of client events and moments that can simply never happen again.
I wouldn't want to lose clients images of moments that will never happen again, couldn't be replicated if you even tried.
Still have my pics from my first Kodak DC265 digi cam back from 1999. Certainly don't want to lose them.
I really need to get one of these. Fingers crossed for the giveaway! Obviously I'd hate to lose any of my good (portfolio) images or client images, but I'd also really hate to lose all of the (16TB+) footage from the show I produced, co-wrote, and DP'ed on. When I get one of these that's one of the first things that's going on it. We have a few backups in two different locations, but still. It's spread across many hard drives because we shot it back before even 4TB drives were feasibly priced.
A year ago, I lost nearly 2000 images of a trip I had taken to Tanzania and the Serengeti. It taught me an expensive lesson to take image backups seriously and would love to add a NAS Unit to my routine.
As with most of the others losing my photo’s and videos would be catastrophic!
family photos... can't replace those moments. my family pictures from my childhood were lost and it still hurts me
I wouldn't want to loose my first photos I ever took when I was 14, I have them backed up on a few drives in a firebox at my parents house. I would love to have them on this storage solution so I can have them to remember where I started and old photos of my family.
I have a ton of photos of family members who are no longer with us (irreplaceable).
I just had a drive die and my only other drive is now nearly full with over 3 TB going back nearly 15 years. Defcon level 3.
I'd hate to lose anything, but the family pictures would be the worst.
I don't want to lose anything, but now that I'm shooting for clients I feel them super nerves about losing stuff they may want to purchase or revisit down the road.
I wouldn't want to lose client photos or scans of old family photos.
I don’t want to lose anything. I have set up a RAID drive in my PC, but it’s not always online in the network like a NAS
I wish i had one before i lost my 2010 archive
Photos of family are the absolute thing I wouldn't want to lose in a crash. those are irreplaceable
I wouldn't want to lose the raw files of my first trip to Alaska in 2018!!!
ive been thinking about the need for some sort of more reliable and organized backup/network for a long time - this may just be the ticket for what will fit my needs. Too many photo and design files i'd hate to lose!!
Photos of my sister before she left home for college
I wouldn’t want to lose my family photos and videos.
I wouldn't want to lose any of my work due to a HD failure but the thought of losing images of my children growing up would be far more impactful than losing my professional work.
Keeping a running image library of my son as he grows up and all of our family outings so far, as well as all of our wedding photos and video. Losing any of that would be soul crushing. Also any hard drive failures for my work would severely inhibit my workflow and prevent me from producing content on the fly. My employer wont pay for any of my gear so I'm forced to buy it all myself and a NAS is out of my budget at the moment.
Hold up, this has hard drives, so how does it protect against hard drive failure? You put identical data in both bays? That being said, I want one, so I'd hate to lose the RAW files of my kids.
I store about a third of a Petabyte currently on a 12 slot NAS and two 8 drive RAID 5 systems plus offsite storage. I also have online backups of some of the more critical files. It is costly but losing files is even more costly.
Photos, specifically family photos. But all my images are important.
two decades of photos!