From time to time I get asked how we store and backup all of our photos. Depending on how many photos you take, and with what you take them, this can be quite the chore.
I have used many ways to store and backup our photos in the past. We started with a simple computer, no backup. The first computer I remember us having together was a Dell Dimension E510. After Sam deleted a few files on accident we started an online backup with Carbonite. It worked… but soon some of its flaws became evident.
We used Carbonite back during our DSL internet days. We didn’t depend on the internet as much back then, but the upload speeds were an issue. Carbonite would start a backup, usually during my xBox live time, and we’d effectively have no internet for the duration of the backup.
This got old, quick.
To help prevent data loss of everything from a drive failure, I moved to using a cheap RAID card in the computer. We had 2x 1TB Western Digital hard drives, big for back then, in RAID 1; meaning they mirror each other. This provided redundancy for 1 drive to fail. The remaining drive could be used to restore the replacement drive.
We continued to use Carbonite to backup the RAID array, with some tweaks to scheduling. The backup would start at 2AM and not run during the day.
This worked for a while. But then we ran out of disk space.
It was also time to replace the computer, and the RAID card would not work in the new system. Time to get creative.
Sam liked her laptops, but laptops don’t have the ability to have additional drives added, and very few of them support RAID. This moved me to another direction; NAS.
Network Attached Storage devices (NAS) are like little servers, but all they do is store and share files. There are many NAS drives available. QNAP, Western Digital, etc. I went with Synology.
Click here to see the Synology on Amazon
Skipping ahead in the story a little bit to avoid running on about our many different Synology’s and the setups, we currently are running a Synology DS214se. We have 2x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf hard drives in RAID 1 providing for single drive redundancy. For the record, we use just under 3TB of data.
Using a NAS drive instead of our computer provides many advantages. The RAID management is handled by the NAS drive, leaving our computers resources free for whatever we are doing. With gigabit network speeds, and also reducing any network hops to a minimum (real technical so we won’t go there), load times are almost unnoticeable.
Using a Synology also opens up a backup possibility not readily available for the computer, Amazon AWS.
Using Glacier storage and the Glacier app on the Synology, we are able to backup our photos and data to the Amazon cloud for super cheap. Like $5-6 month cheap. The draw backs to Glacier storage are simple; restoring the data costs money & Glacier storage is not meant to be fast. My thoughts on this are easy. If we need to restore our data, we’ve already saved enough to pay for the extra costs associated with restoration and it is still cheaper than drive recovery. And restoration processes always take time, we can wait for the Glacier storage times.
This is how we store and backup our photos.
Setting Up Glacier: https://www.ceos3c.com/cloud/synology-nas-glacier-backup-ultimate-guide/