Why a NAS Unit Should Be Your Next Purchase, and How You Can Win One in This Giveaway

Why a NAS Unit Should Be Your Next Purchase, and How You Can Win One in This Giveaway

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.

Wasim Ahmad's picture

Wasim Ahmad is an assistant teaching professor teaching journalism at Quinnipiac University. He's worked at newspapers in Minnesota, Florida and upstate New York, and has previously taught multimedia journalism at Stony Brook University and Syracuse University. He's also worked as a technical specialist at Canon USA for Still/Cinema EOS cameras.

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I wouldn't want to lose anything! My retoucher and I are constantly juggling hard drives and now 5 years into a gigantic project we've filled up almost 12tb of space between multiple hard drives. Its a pain having our images in multiple places because when we go to pull an old file we have to play a game of WHICH HARD DRIVE IS THAT ON AGAIN??? for those who have played that game you know it's not a fun one.

I wouldn't want to lose pictures of my daughter!

Losing family photos would be the worst, however I have many years of concert photography that I would hate to see gone!

I certainly don't want to be the photographer who has to tell a wedding client I lost the photos of their special day :o

All my pictures! My laptop has limited storage, and I've been moving them to an external drive

Losing my family photos for sure, but also the old and the new from my business.

WEDDING PHOTOS! I couldn't imagine losing years of photos from all the weddings I shot. Need I repeat- WEDDING PHOTOS!

Mostly afraid of losing my mind in a catastrophic hard drive failure without back-up.

offcourse losing all my profesional pictures would be a disaster, but the pictures of my son would be even wordse!

I had to send an external hard drive back for recovery after my cat tipped it over. $1600 for a 500GB drive just to retrieve my wedding portfolio backup was not how I wanted to spend my money.

I wouldn't want to lose the pictures of my family!

The prospect of losing the 11,000+ family pictures from the 1980s and 1990s that I've scanned and curated is terrifying. 3-2-1 backups are the way to go, and a NAS can be an important portion of a storage system.

I am a wedding photographer so loosing photos that cannot be replaced is a nightmare!

Loosing my memory as I get older, I often rely on my photo collection to remind me of the life I've had with family and friends. Seeing photos of the folks I've loved throughout my life brings smiles, tears and warmth to my heart. I try to backup my collection as often as possible on multiple drives, but the thought of loosing all those images brings another kinds of tears to my eyes.

I have about 10tb of images/video at this point, losing any of it would be terrible.

anything older than 10 years old I am shooting faster than I buying Hard drives. Probably 20 to 30 years of stuff

i have so much stuff on my regular hard drives... i feel chills just thinking of loosing it all. it would be a welcome prize definitely

I lost a hard drive once, and lost a clients images. Worse feeling in the world. Still bothers me today. I bought a system way back then, but now its in desperate need of being replaced. I would love to have a modern solution.

I wouldn´t want to lose a single thing, but my travel and family images are specially valuable. The storage struggle is real!

I worked on a travel show spanning Dubai, Maui, Fiji, and the Maldives, and there are definitely footage and photographs that I CANNOT lose. Plus, I have film projects shot on my Alexa that would be incredibly expensive to reshoot. There's just no way to do it.

Just a few days ago, my house was in danger of a fire from the wild brush fire in the north side of Los Angeles, and I know that if I can have main NAS at home, I can use my other hard drives as mobile remote storage that I can put at the office, and vice versa.

I need this and would love to win it!

I would be devastated if we lost all of our family photos!

I would hate to lose my old scanned film images. It would be a whole project to have to rescan everything!

As someone who just moved files over because a drive decided not to play nice with a new tower and then after taking days to move the files to an external (that is not unhappy with me adding a couple terabytes worth of files to it in a week) -- yeah a NAS would make my life easier for sure.

I've been meaning to make this switch for a while now. Losing anything on any of my externals would be terrible.

The one thing I fear losing most in a hard drive crash: my sanity!

I have years of family photos i wouldn't want to lose

Decades of images.

I would hate to lose the photos that I have yet to back up (which is everything the last year....)

Client invoices!

Family photos especially those family members that I will never be able to photograph again is one of the main things I would hate to loose.

I cannot and would not want to lose every piece of art that I have created.

My images and surveillance videos around my house.

Pictures of my gramma. She'll be 99 next month and I've been going back through her old slides and photos as well as compiling all the pictures I have taken of her. Have put together a few photo books for her and they make her very happy.

In addition to all my photos and videos, years and years of my turbotax tax returns 😕

Just came back from two weeks of Aspen hunting in Colorado. Need somewhere safe I can backup my 5000+ images and all of my previously existing landscapes!

Lost already as I have a UK address :-(

I've lost photos to a HD crash... I would never again want to lose personal photos.

I would like to save a screenshot of this page and save it on my Synology drive.

Client work would be terrible to lose, but can be re-shot. It's the family photos I wouldn't want to lose.

100 years worth of family photos, and my work archives

Customer Data! It's one thing lose your stuff, another entirely to lose someone else's.

I would cry if I miss all my travel shots from the last years, with tons of unforgettable and magic moments!

Photos of my son from birth (digitized prints and slides) till today as well as photos of my grandchildren as newborns til today.

My documentary footage of unique ways, how people produce alcohol in exotic countries, which is waiting still to be edited for a few years. Strong liquors like beer from a coconut tree in Tanzania, dangerously strong vodka from honey in Vietnam, Strong alcohol from garbages in Kenya and so on. :)

I would not want to loose all the photos of the wife (and ex) and yeah the hundreds of QB12 et al.

I simply do not want lose my photographic memories

decades of family photos and the last three 5daydeal packages.

My collection of german expressionism films from the 20s!

Losing photos of my son growing up would be devastating to me.

Losing vacations pictures

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