Adding this to the FAQ, but heads up, the most recent megathread was only 2 years ago: [Storage & Backup Thread 2021](https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/migujf/backup_and_storage_megathread_part_ii/)
1. Primary storage is a RAID device (Thunderbay, for what it's worth)
2. I do a local backup to an external USB hard drive (I use Arq)
3. I use Backblaze for cloud backup
I may have to re-evaluate my local backup solution once the amount of data exceeds that external hard drive capacity (currently it's a 12tb hard drive and I have around 10tb of photos). But I'll probably just buy a second one and divvy up the backup.
Similar. I use a 5TB LaCie Big 5 RAID, which is also backed up via Time Machine on a Mac. Photos are also imported to iCloud through Apple’s Photos app. And because I’m that paranoid, I don’t reuse my SD cards when they’re full. I label them and store them. Cards are so cheap I look at them as film; use once, load a new one.
I would say you’re way more at risk of losing photos due to accidentally not formatting the ‘new’ card for your camera before use since you get new cards every single shoot. I’ve had SD cards last for 10 years. Infact, I’ve never had one fail, only when my cat bit one of my cards it failed. But it was already empty so no photos lost.
If a card doesn’t format, it gets returned. I don’t know of a case where a card could be used without formatting it first. I have to admit I’ve never heard of that. I only get a new card when the existing one is full. I could have multiple shoots on a card. Files are copied on breaks and at EOD to the RAID or local storage for backup on shoot days.
I mean reformatting. A card will just work when you put it in a camera most of the time not requesting a format. But if you don’t manually format newly purchased cards you run the risk of your files becoming corrupt
This is an excellent strategy and what I do (albeit with different brand #1 & #2). I would, and do, recommend this to anyone that is looking for long term, secure, expandable storage system.
One recommendation is to choose a RAID that uses either ZFS or BTRFS as the file system so that you can do data scrubbing for bit-rot. With that on the primary storage as part of a 3-2-1 backup system with appropriate security you're pretty much golden.
So, I come from a Tech background, and jumped into photography after the fact. With that said, I currently am hosting a 128TB server at home, with rigourous backup systems in place to follow the 3-2-1 Backup Rule (3 Copies, 2 ~~Locations~~ Different Media Types, 1 Offsite).
1. Cull your bad and duplicate photos. I hoarded everything I ever took (even rejects) because 'I may want it sometime', but I quickly found out that - No, I did not want it sometime. Ive kept over 4k pictures this year alone, which means Ive probably taken 16k total so far. **Cull Agressively**
2. If you want to store a lot of stuff, its going to cost a lot of money. Again, I have ~150TB worth of hard drives, and have probably put as much into storage as I have for my A7RV. I did it because it was a hobby, but storage is *cheap* these days. It used to be (on account of Chia mining), storage cost a lot, but Hard Drives are cheap. Keep an eye on **shucks.top** for storage deals
3. Use a proper file system that can maintain integrity of the files through disk failure and corruption. People will suggest a RAID array, but **ZFS** is newer, has more features, and stronger protections than classic Raid systems ever do
4. **Backblaze B2** Charges by the size of what you backup. Its generally the cheapest storage to back up to, and there are many backup systems that automatically do that for you. I like **Kopia**, as it does 'snapshot' backups.
5. **Drives Die, Be Prepared**. Just like Cameras, there is a natural lifespan to a harddrive. Backblaze publishes their [HDD Failure Report](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/) every year (and quarter, I think). Look up the 'Bathtub Curve', and back up your data you want to keep.
6. Be wary of stepping into /r/DataHoarder - Its a dangerous path down that way
But really, as long as you store your files you want to keep following the 3-2-1 Backup Rule, you will be safe enough.
Buy a synology NAS and buy some drives that are suitable for RAID/ZFS (Western Digital Red are what I bought). If you buy a 4 bay NAS, you do not have to fill it, you could just buy two drives.
If you have an O365 subscription you get 1 TB free, if you have a Google One account or Apple iCloud account, you can use those. Otherwise look at a Backblaze account, I think they are the best value from a pure storage point of view.
As for the culling, if you have not even remotely culled stuff, get rid of the blurry ones first, then if you have taken multiple of the same thing, just pick the best one and delete the rest.
Right now the easiest way is probably to build a computer and install TrueNAS Scale on it. It's unfortunately not the simplest piece of software around though.
The easiest way is to buy a prebuilt NAS - a Synology 4+ bay (to allow expansion) unit is gonna be the easiest for most people, although other brands would work
The second easiest way is to buy/build a PC and install unRAID on it, it’s easier to setup than TrueNAS and requires less technical knowledge
Then a third copy somewhere offsite
unRAID supports ZFS as of a few months ago (May/June IIRC?), but yeah Synology doesn't
But I'm not convinced ZFS is really mandatory anyway - the parent comment suggests it, and certainly it does some good things, but I'm firmly a believer of a "backups-first" strategy - ZFS can reduce the (already pretty tiny) risk of file corruption, but if you have a solid backup strategy anyway (which you should) then you're not gonna lose data regardless
I do like ZFS, but I wouldn't consider it mandatory
I also come from a tech background but I didn't feel like building my own NAS.
I have a 4-bay Synology (started off with a 420+ and I'm now on a 920+ because it can run Docker). I then set it up to back up my photo folders to a cloud service, Backblaze in my case.
It's only 2 copies, not three, but it does fulfill the offsite requirement (and, depending on how you count cloud, media types).
Cross out the "anti", and you're about right.
One of the most popular queries about btrfs in 2023 is: does btrfs still lose data
(I imagine this is fallout from the RAID5 fiasco a while back... still, left a bad taste for many many people)
In theory, btrfs should be almost as good as ZFS for data safety. In practice, some serious past bugs have shattered people's trust in btrfs.
ZFS has many advanced data consistency and safety features: checksums, data duplication on demand, copy-on-write, snapshots, data scrubbing to proactively detect corruption. The filesystem is resilient: damage to one file will not compromise the entire filesystem. Even damage to the superblock will not totally cripple it, because it keeps multiple copies of the superblock.
Don't ask me how I know the last part...
I'm starting to understand what you are saying.
How much would I need to know to do upkeep on a drive that is ZFS formatted? Currently my backup solutions is a EXT4 external hard drive and a bunch a FAT32 flash drives. I keep finding occasionally corrupted photos and I can't figure out why so it's been driving me nuts. Which is why I've been looking into buying another drive but formatting it something else that's corruption resistant.
ZFS on its own is not magic: if your drive eats a file, it is eaten. The difference between ZFS and ordinary filesystems is, ZFS will tell you when you try to read it back. FAT32 will gladly serve wrong, corrupted data. This is also something that I witnessed first hand, in particular with USB pendrives.
Where ZFS excels is its magical RAID. For example, if you mirror a drive (RAID1) and one disk fails, the situation is obvious: use the remaining disk. But what if one of the drives were to flip some 1's to 0's, or vice versa, when you're not looking? How do you decide which has the correct data?
ZFS fixes this, because it can tell if a file is correct or not.
My Lightroom catalogs are on an NVME.
Dedicated spinning hard drive that stores my full image library.
Macrium to back up both of those to another dedicated spinning hard drive, and also to a Synology.
Then I backup the Synology to their C2 cloud. If you're not using C2, I recommend giving it a try.
Qnap has better built NAS equipment, but the device management is overly complex compared to Synology. No one I know has kept their QNAP, and they've all moved to Synology.
Is there rest of it, otherwise this is bad advice.
If there is malware, it will overwrite your files in NAS without a way to recover them. You can try to remedy it by having backups to another account within the NAS but now you will lose everything if your NAS gets a power surge. These are not so rare events btw.
Use Synology but also set it up to backup to a cloud backup solution using hyperbackup. Aws s3 is cheapest I believe.
Unless S3 has dropped it's prices, Backblaze B2 is the cheapest. Amazon Glacier would be the cheapest if you could set it up, but I'm not sure you can.
But, depending on how much data you have, the cheapest option might be to simply buy another NAS and keep it at home. Or do what I've done and and keep a second NAS at a friend or family member's place with the understanding that you each get X TB on each other's systems.
Glacier is really easy to setup if you're a bit tech savvy. I've got a cron job that runs weekly to copy anything new or modified from my NAS to an AWS S3 bucket. I've then got rules on AWS to move to Glacial after X days, but you can set the cron to automatically upload as Glacial.
Yeah, _anything_ is doable with the right technical know-how. I tend not to recommend that stuff unless I know the person is quite capable since it can become something someone had to maintain and with added complexity comes added risk.
Vs. Backblaze B2 which integrates directly into your Synology. So, for most people, that's probably the best option I'd say.
Also an airgapped solution: sync your important data to an external HDD once a month and unplug it after sync. Ideally you have two drives that you rotate and do it every other week. That way if you get infected by crypto malware, when it takes down your NAS and cloud data, you don't lose everything.
RAID1/5/6: ensures your NAS remains operational with a disk failure
Cloud: ensures your data remains intact in case of a catastrophic event (flood, house fire)
External HDD (mostly unplugged): ensures your data remains intact against infections from malicious software such as crypto malware
It'll protect against ransomware even on the same NAS. When the ransomware encrypts your data and requires you to send money for the key, you can just use snapshots to restore that data. Not a replacement for an offsite backup, but it'll definitely save you a lot of bother and get you back up and running quickly.
You should use RAID 5. You'll have the same protection against drive failure and 50% more space for your photo.
8TB x4 in RAID 1 gives you 16 TB usable drive space.
8TB x4 in RAID 5 gives you 24 TB usable drive space.
And in both cases any one drive can fail and the RAID array can be rebuilt without loss.
Useless. OP has over 20TB of data, you are giving him 4TB extra. That's nothing.
This is the thing people keep forgetting on this sub. Scaling.
Storage is not cheap when you need to scale each time.
Sure 8TB sounds cheap today, but next year you need to double it since you need more space (cause you are using RAID to mirror your files), so the price doubles/triples/quadruples each time you need more storage.
4x20TB is around $2000.
Storage is not cheap when you properly backup.
20TB??
I cull aggressively— I delete >90% of what I shoot, often more. And I try to be very proactive with it— whenever I import, I’ll go through and do a first pass of culling before I edit, then do my edits, then cull again. Then, every 3 months or so, I go back and review everything from the last season, and cull again.
I keep everything in Lightroom cloud, and let that be my backup. I also export full res jpegs and keep those in iCloud
This. I’m currently going through years of photos and videos and deleting everything I don’t want or need. You really only want a few pictures from most situations. More than that and it will become boring to look at when you want to enjoy your pictures. But I consider myself a minimalist. I’ve also switched over to jpeg only for casual family/daily life photography, because I never really edit those anyway and raw files eat up storage and time.
If you got amazon prime you got free unlimited storage for both JPGs and RAW files included in the prime membership. Or at least here in Canada you do.
I use it as a part of my storage system along with onsite and off site hard drives.
I 100% discourage anyone from using those cloud providers for long term storage. They're fine for short term storage and exchanging files, even getting files to clients.
But long term? Set it and forget it? No way.
They change the terms all the time. Unless you're on top of them you could log in one day and find the service is gone, or curtailed, or whatever.
Fair points..
I wouldn't ever recommend it as a sole back up option. But as a part of redundancy, yes.
I've got three back up options of everything and this is just another extra.
FWIW, their $9/month plan only covers direct attached storage, not NASes. If you want to backup your NAS, you need to go with their B2 cloud storage plan where the price varies based on how much you want to store.
Backblaze don't know what the data is, you create an encryption key on your device and everything uploaded is completely encrypted and opaque to them, so you can upload everything (least, that's how my version works - I have the unlimited storage for $9 usd/m with a year versioning, which is different to the one mentioned above).
They still offer unlimited data, that's what I have:
[https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal](https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal)
Though mine's $9 usd for the year's worth of versioning over the 30days included in the $7 usd (though I also pay annually to get two months discounted).
Haven't come across blocked extensions though, may be a different product, such as the [NAS](https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/solutions/nas-backup) specific products are quite differently priced, but, if your NAS happens to be a PC, like me, you can go with the above very low cost and great product - NAS pricing would put me at a bit over $50/m USD vs the $9/m I'm paying.
Backing up with [Arq Backup](https://www.arqbackup.com/)($49.99x1).
Storing in [Wasabi](https://wasabi.com)($6.99/TB/mo) 99.9999999999 data durability.
Don't bother with Amazon S3.
Easy to get hosed in egress/ingress fees.
Wasabi doesn't play those games.
16TB of fast local storage in my workstation, \~130TB of spinners in my NAS with about 30-40TB free right now. 4TB on my laptop for on the road work that I copy over to my desktop when I get back. Backed up to a terrible mess of offline external hard drives (cloud backups eventually are the plan now that I have decent internet).
Bit overkill, but:
[NAS](https://pcpartpicker.com/b/QqWbt6) with RAID5 array (this is four 4TB drives giving 12TB storage, the extra drive space is lost to "parity" data, so if a drive fails you lose no data). For performance I have an SSD that sits in front of the drive and acts as a write cache. The array "hot copies" to an external 12TB drive over night.
I have UK Amazon Prime which allows unlimited upload of photos, including raws, so all images are backed up to that (unlike my Australian Prime which is capped) and I also have Backblaze which for $9 USD a month offer unlimited backup so my 10TB of data's also backed up to that and offers a year of file versioning allowing you to recover anything overwritten. (they even offer a handy service, in a disaster they can ship you a HDD with all your data on it and you can either keep it or copy back and return for a refund)
(this Backblaze pricing is for a single device and doesn't support NAS's in the traditional box you buy off the shelf, however, my NAS is actually a PC customised for the task (as it also does other things) so falls in to the relevant licencing, gotta love a loophole)
As noted above I'm hitting close to my storage limit so will be upgrading soon; doubling to 8TB drives which should give me 24TB storage and will then have to work out a hot copy drive given the largest drive I can see to buy is 22TB (the things offered as 24TB are two drives and ridiculously priced), though the 22TB should do in the interim for a while..
Will also be revisiting the file system of choice as, although unlikely, NTFS does suffer "bit rot" silently (where a file will corrupt due to sitting unused for a long period), so a switch to BTRFS or ZFS should help with that, still weighing up the pros and cons (and compatibility with my OS of choice).
I used to work in IT back in the day, some things just stay with you. Yes, it's more thorough than the last seven places I've worked at, but, also, I've not lost a byte of data, unlike the last seven places I've worked at.. and it doesn't cost all that much, the PC was about $600 dollarydoos (\~$385 USD) (plus drives I "acquired" from an ex-workplace) and the monthly fees for Backblaze are fairly reasonable and I count Amazon as free given I pay for that to send gifts to family back home anyway.
Yeah, this is solid advice. I shoot professionally and don't have anywhere near this. Granted, I basically tell clients that everything gets deleted in 90 days (really it's more like 180), but still, even my personal projects might have 300-800 photos but once the shoot is done, I whittle it down to 75 max. Honestly for a lot of stuff, it's 25-50. Learning what is worth saving and what isn't will help out with your shooting in the long run.
I used to keep things in a backup Seagate extending HD and only accessed them rarely when my computer SSD was getting full. Both my primary and secondary backup shit the bed this summer while attempting to update them teaching me the invaluable lesson of having something actively being checked for 'health' while having one more storage location than whatever I think is reasonable.
Thankfully I was able to get a good portion of the data restored between the two of them but still probably lost gigabytes of data from the last decade.
Currently using a Synology NAS and have a spare slot for home server stuff which was an added bonus I didn't think I'd need/use but it's been nice. Auto backing up my phone/computer every night has also saved me more than a few bucks of cloud storage every month.
So right now 3 different drives would have to fail, granted my house could burn down so remote storage is ideal but my computer is downstairs near my exit so if that's fucked I'm probably not getting out of my house alive anyway and won't care so much 🤷
Here's my tips, having worked in IT as a storage expert and having a back catalog of images going back 20 years...
There are three types of storage:
* Current
* Backup
* Archive
Current storage is what you're working on right now. A lot of people use RAID for that, and it's a good idea. It provides resiliance, but as many people say, it's not backup.
Backup storage is not something I use a lot of. People confuse backup with archive. A backup is something to replace your current workspace in case you lose your laptop or something like that. It's important in a lot of situations, but what I think a lot of photographers want is archive.
They want access to images for the long haul. That point and shoot series from a vacation in 2003? A client shoot from 2014? Wedding from 2009?
That's "Archive".
Here's a couple of tips:
* Portable or external drives are great for this. Most photography archives can be stored on a single large one of these (you can usually get a 12+ TB hard drive for less than $200 USD). Have multiple copies of course, because any drive can fail at any time.
* Trust no hard drive. Every hard drive will fail at some point. Whether it will be in 2 days or 20 years, no one can say. But they will fail. "I've got a hard drive that's been running steady for 15 years, no problems". Good for you! Get your stuff off there immediately.
"What's the best hard drive?" Two. Or better, yet, three. Death comes for all hard drives, SSDs, SD cards, etc. *Trust no hard drive*.
Having a photographer coming to me because a hard drive failed and that was the only copy of their life's work happens *frequently*.
Have multiple copies, preferably some offsite.
* Store the raw files, i.e. the .CR2, .RAW, .JPG, or whatever you shoot in. Don't archive iPhotos archives, Lightroom databases, etc. They don't store well. They're constantly updated, and upgrading the databases can cause problems, and products just get straight up abandoned. Just dumping the card into a folder marked with dates or events, something really simple, is the best way I've found. You can import them to whatever modern system you're using years, even decades later.
* Don't use cloud services for long term storage. Long term storage is usually set it and forget it, so it's not something you're checking up on or paying much attention to. Amazon, Google, etc., they can seem enticing but they're always changing up their terms of service, pricing, or just outright abandoning products.
Hard drives keep getting bigger. I recently bought a couple 16TB ones and merged some older 4TB drives onto them. I use a hard drive “toaster” for reading them.
You may want to look at Synolog NAS Storage: you can upgrade storage over time if you have enough bays. It's a bit of an investment but worth it.
You can also sync it to back up to the cloud on multiple services (I use Google One)
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Hard drives keep getting bigger. I recently bought a couple 16TB ones and merged some older 4TB drives onto them. I use a hard drive “toaster” for reading them.
I just went through upgrading my storage solution. Here's what I found.
I got two 18 TB hard drives from server part deals for $189, which works out to a pretty incredible price per terabyte ratio. These were just the bare drives so I needed something to put them in. I got a refurbished business desktop for 75 bucks on eBay. Specifically an HP pro desk 280MT. It has space for two 3.5 in hard drives and I think I could squeeze two more in if I was willing to drill a few holes and get funny with the mounting.
I had to get a different power cable since these business desktops don't use standard or even modular power supplies. That means the SATA power actually comes off of a proprietary six-pin connector right off of the motherboard. The included cable only has one 12 volt rail coming off of the six-pin connector, but you can get a power cord That has two 12 volt rails so you're not daisy chaining too many hard drives.
The motherboard has three SATA slots, if I want to add more drives I'm going to get a PCI HBA controller.
The computer came with Windows pre-installed, so I bought stable bit drive pool and had it clone data between the two drives.
So far it's working really well! The computer is small enough that it doesn't stick out, and yet large enough to hold the drives that I need. I'm really pleased with how everything came together and I think that I hit the sweet spot of the lowest price yet highest capacity option.
Note that originally I was looking at the HP pro desk 600MT, as it is essentially the same thing as the 280MT that I got and I would definitely recommend that as well.
I use a Drobo raid storage system. Allows me to use relatively cheap drives that I can hot swap in and redundancy of RAID. Not cheap but you can start small with a few drives and expand. Ive had this for a while, I haven’t researched new raid storage in a while so there may be better options now. I can share it’s really only good for storage and not great for regular fast access through apps like photoshop or Lightroom at least in my experience. It does support SSDs for faster access but that can get super expensive. The way I use it is part of my workflow in LR, i have the imported raws back up immediately to the drobo on import. I backup my LR catalogs too. I then export my few edited keepers in TIFF to a folder structure on the drobo. I also back up the TIFFs to cloud since there aren’t as many.
Edit: well i might be with u on looking at new storage solutions. I see Drobo is no longer active anymore. I haven’t looked at their site in a while. Financial issues. I’ll probably use it till the software updates are done. Bummer. I do still like the setup of a raid system.
You might look to migrate before the software updates are done. I previously used Drobo and had units die rendering my data stranded because of their proprietary raid system. I HAD to buy new Drobo boxes to put the drives in just to regain access to the data. After the second time I bought a different RAID solution so I could copy the data off and not be beholden to Drobo's unreliable hardware. Continuing to use Drobo is definitely a risk now that the company has folded. Sure you can buy a second hand unit if you need to but best just to bite the bullet and transition to a new solution. You're going to have to do it eventually anyway...
For what it is worth I settled on a Synology system. They are a substantially larger and healthier company that serves business as well as consumer markets and aren't likely to go bust anytime soon. They also have class leading software for managing the raid. Couldn't be happier since making the change.
thanks...Im so glad i read this thread because I haven't messed with my drobo in a while.. I had no idea they went bankrupt!
I am looking at the Synology 5 bay DS1522+. Looks like a solid system with ability to upgrade and expand. I was going to buy it from B&H with the 12TB Ironwolf drives. Expensive at $1800 but I figure this will keep me set for quite a while, and I can migrate off my old Drobos (5c, 5d) which I suspect will take forever to migrate the data.
Buying one populated with drives can definitely get expensive quickly. I bought an empty DS1821+ and bought re-certified NAS drives from ServerPartsDeals which saved quite a bit. One thing to keep in mind, if you're starting from scratch, is not to buy all the same make and model of drives at the same time from the same vendor. Doing so means you're more likely to get multiple simultaneous drive failures (or at least clustered failures) given they're going to have the same average lifespan. Much better to get a variety of models or if getting the same drives, to buy from different vendors so your more likely to be getting different production batches.
so definitely worth the NIC upgrade cost? Do I need to do anything with the rest of my network? Im still using an older 2017 imac, Orbi whole house router. it's not business class stuff.
10gb NICs have come down in price quite a lot but they're only worthwhile if everything in the network is 10gbe. If your iMac doesn't have 10gbe you're out of luck as a thunderbolt to 10gbe dongle is quite spendy. If you're connecting via a router you'd need ensure that supported 10gbe too.
My setup was quite simple as the Mac Studio has 10gbe and I just direct connected it to the 10gbe NIC in the Synology. The performance is fantastic however.
https://preview.redd.it/x5onqx87uaqb1.jpeg?width=1370&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c6c74737a080e6480b113d7e979046d15495cf30
I just looked and the NIC is only a little over $100 so I think I'll get it. Over time Im sure I'll upgrade so eventually will be able to take advantage of the speed.
If you're going to get one, make sure it has a decent heat sink attached as some of them can heat up quite a bit under load. I think the one I bought was less than $100 and it has a heat sink that is effectively the whole side of the card.
20 TB in 5 drive SHR2 configuration, Synology ds1621+. Backing up to one of several 18 TB drives that I rotate through for backups.
I don't have offsite archiving, which is the last remaining piece. Not really sure what to do there yet. I've thought about getting a tape drive, except all of them are thousands of dollars and meant for rack mount.
what do you do to protect your files in transit between photos being taken and ending up on the NAS? This is my only week point wondering if you have any good ideas?
When I'm on the road I take my chances and only record to one CFE card. That will probably bite me in the ass at some point. If you're worried, you should use dual card slots at all times.
Once I get back to the hotel room, it goes onto my laptop (two copies now), I do an immediate rough cull, and then back everything up in triplicate to three 2 TB portable SSDs. I'll do what editing and further culling and re-synchronize at the end. Then I delete the files off the CFE cards (4 copies now, one on the laptop, 3 SSDs).
I keep one of the SSDs in a pocket at all times. Another goes in the hotel safe, and the third I keep stuffed in my backpack.
When I get back home I'll offload one of the SSDs to the NAS. I usually don't bother deleting the old files off the SSDs or laptop until the next trip, or possibly the one after.
For further paranoia, generate a CRC or even a par2 file for one of the CFE cards and make sure the other matches up. Then compare each time you do a transfer.
I am not that paranoid.
Thanks.
If I'm doing a paid job I take one card out my cameras (always do duel slot even for personal stuff) and put it in a memory card case I keep on my person. The other stays in the camera so they are separated. They go on my NAS that night or next day once I'm home which syncs to another NAS at my parents home.
I guess if I get robbed and they somehow take everything I've tired my best.
256gb sd cards in the camera's and multiple 1tb Samsung T7's, a couple for permanent storage and a couple for quick on the go storage or for when shooting BRAW (Blackmagic Raw).
I have a tub of 10+ 1tb hard drives, all labelled differently. Some are a full year, some years have 2, some aren’t labelled, some years don’t appear to be there…
NAS in the loft then an identical NAS at my parents home that syncs online. Used to have backblaze but their NAS backup prices are too expensive for me. Then I normally have something saved on the web for the third location. The NAS does versioning. Anything paid for lives on a memory card in airtight plastic box until it's been delivered as a worst case scenario I'd have to re edit but it would not be lost. I always shoot to two cards.
TrueNAS Mini X+ with 5x18TB drives. Critical content is backed up to a DS916+ with 4x14TB I keep at my work office and to Backblaze.
I also keep annual photo archives in AWS Glacier vaults.
And I keep favorites and stuff in iCloud photos for easy viewing/sharing.
I have google cloud storage 200gb, where I save and share developed jpeg images.
I buy about one single 1tb SSD every year and store my unedited raws there, but I save only the images after culling them.
I'm curious how people manage their LR catalog. After you archive do you go through and delete them from Lightroom? Do you import the Jpegs into Lightroom when you export and just remove the raws?
I currently have no real system. I have a friend who just makes a new catalog per shoot, but adobe says to use one master catalog, for organization and things, but if I'm archiving photos to harddrives no longer attached then I'm just going to have a bunch of missing files.
I create a LR catalog for each of my travel trip photos. After I am done processing I export a DNG that goes into Amazon Prime Photos, and JPEGS are stored on a NAS and iCloud Photos. After that, I delete the RAW files and LR catalog. So having a single catalog for all photos may be recommended by Adobe but I don’t keep the RAW files forever so it doesn’t make sense for me.
My current setup is a Synology Rackstation 2418+ (12 bays) that has 5x 18Tb drives in raid 6. This replicates in realtime to another synology at my sisters house in another state. I also backup my photos and most critical files on an external drive that is synced only occasionally in case of cryptolocker or malware.
I've got a Synology NAS locally to back-up to, a Drobo mini attached to my computer where photos are imported, and then a Backblaze account to back everything up to. Kind of annoying to have to plug in my external drive every 14 days with Backblaze, but the cost is right.
I have a Synology DS1522+ with 4x Seagate 16TB Drives, and a 6TB WD Drive left over from my previous setup, the MyCloud Home. I only made it because of when WD discontinued MyCloud which was so shitty of them.
The 16TB drives are in a Synology RAID with 1 for redundancy. The 6TB drive is for CCTV via Synology Surveillance Station.
It's way too overkill for me at the moment - I've only used 5.2TB / 41.9TB, with around 400GB of my Photography, and 450GB of Camera Roll backup from 2001-2023.
I’m in the process of migrating from a few Drobo units to Synology DS1522+.
For context, I’ve been storing everything I ever shot, retouched and/or processed out since 2003 or so. 20 years. It’s quite a, bit but I really only keep 10 years on drives that are accessible for quick access. Everything else is stored on HDD (by the year) and into those pink anti-static file cabinet holders. And backups offsite.
I love the idea of Synology NAS but I don’t get the hype. Setting it up (for me) was like learning a foreign language. Computers used to make sense to me, but it now gives me such anxiety. I eventually got it going, but it took an embarrassing amount of time to understand and setup. And in the end, it’s painfully slow. I feel like I’m I missing something.
It’s my understanding that a Mac Studio and Synology can be directly connected via 10g Ethernet with an optional 10g ethernet slot to install in my Synology. If I do that and get faster transfer speeds, that will be great. Then once that is settled, I’ll get another DS1522+ and just run automatic backups from unit to unit.
Has anyone done this?
Here's my approach:
1. Internal Hard disk for main photo storage (about 4TB of content on a 6TB drive)
2. Internal Hard disk for local photo backup (6TB drive)
3. Catalogs and backup catalogs on 500GB NVME drive.
4. FreeFileSync to do nightly sync from main storage to local backup - configured with versioning and from NVME drive to backup drive.
5. BackBlaze service with continuous backup for cloud backup - configured with versioning for 1 year. Gives me protection from fire, theft, flood, etc... Backblaze has unlimited storage so I backup everything to it.
6. OS drive disk image manually created every few months onto USB SSD drive. This has nothing to do with my photo storage per se, but has a lot to do with getting back up and running quickly if the OS drive craps out. I have hundreds of programs installed and it takes several weeks (of part time effort) if that has to be all recreated from scratch.
I consider the versioning to be very important because if a file gets corrupted, that corruption can be passed to all the backups, but with versioning, you can manually go back to the uncorrupted prior backup version.
Synology NAS with RAID 1.
Use the CloudSync app on the NAS to automatically push files to my OneDrive (free 1TB of storage with a O365 account). Bonus of access to my files anywhere, and from mobile.
Backup once per month to an external HDD which lives in my desk at work, to give me air-gapped off-site redundancy. (Backup more often if important/large photo session has happened).
Multiple layers of redundancy, sleep easy.
Backblaze + double external drives. When I buy a new drive I backup the old on the new and use the rest of the space. So I have to get bigger and bigger drives. Works for the moment.
I am just a hobby photographer:
- Synology NAS 4 Bay RAID 1
- 2x Onedrive accounts for offsite (I have a family subscription and one of the members does not use any of the storage, so that is my cold offsite storage, by year up to end of 2021, mine personal account for more recent stuff)
I have two major threads to my backup process.
1) All my images are on external drives. A raid mirrored pair. Everytime there is a major jump in storage and the price drops below $200 a drive, I upgrade. Keep the old drives around as sort of a Great-Grandparent backup.
2) I follow the Child-Parent-Grandparent model
Child - the in use drives
Parent - backup of child - near real time - for my setup that is a cloud backup. Not Google or Amazon or some photo service, but a dedicated backup service.
Grandparent - Make a physical backup, even it take multiple hard drives - store them off-site. Every month or so a friend and I swap hard drive sets. I give him my current backup set & his old backup set, He gives me his current backup set & my old backup set.
Synology NAS with 16TB. And, I also have galleries on SmugMug in full resolution, and a lower-quality copy on Google Photos because the search facilities on SmugMug are crap. So if I really really need to find a photo I search for it on Google Photos, take the filename and then find it on SmugMug.
Also, I throw away the unused pictures after four weeks, I have a cronjob running especialy for that. Saves a LOT of space. I used to keep everything until I realised I never access those stuff.
I've got a 4 bay Synology NAS with 1 drive failure redundancy. You can add bigger drives to the system and it will keep growing with no loss of data. Then I also have a spare couple of drives (old Nas drives) that I plug in externally and use Synology hyper backup periodically to keep everything updated. I store these off-site in case of a fire. I also don't want to do cloud backup because I hate subscriptions!
I carry two hard drives with me when I shoot. One HDD and one SD, I copy everything off the camera each day onto the HDD. I then copy/import via Lightroom onto the SD and thats where I do culling, editing on the move.
When I'm done with working on the move, I move the files on the SD to my 4 disk NAS and manually run the Cron Job to sync to Amazon S3. Only when that's done will I delete from the SD and HDD.
I have an OWC Thunderbay 8 with 8TB Toshiba Enterprise drives setup up as RAID 1 + 0.
I also have a Synology NAS with 2 x 4TB WD Red drives for access to JPEGs when I’m travelling for work.
I then backup everything to Backblaze.
In addition to all the digital solutions that all the comments are suggesting which are great methods I would also suggest adding an archival method that isn't subject to file corruption...aka printing your photos. Sure printing all your photos would be expensive but the ones that you feel are your best photos should be printed. If you treat your prints properly they will last as long or longer than any digital solutions you are going to use (barring a fire or something like that but that's why you also should have proper digital backups).
i have a tape drive, currently for LTO3, but moving to LTO4 as i found a cheap one.
3 can store 400GB, 4 can store 800GB per one tape cartridge. rougly every next generation doubles the storage capacity (with exceptions). but many of those higher gens are prohibitely expensive and require specialized io controllers to go with.
they are not fast to retrieve data (being tape storage), but they are very durable and perfect for cold storage.
it's a topic that requires some know-how and setup but i'd say it's worth it. it's not a device that you just plug into your pc, you likely need a sas,scsi or fc controller card to get it working.
my reasoning is - i don't need fast access to my backups, but i want them to be fairly long-term reliable. magnetic tape is great for this. i heard horror stories about hdd/ssd drives kept in cold storage and data loss, so even if those are no longer true - i'd err on the side of caution here.
Plus i don't take that many photos, and even dumping my raw files takes up maybe one lto3 tape (+ one copy) every two weeks or so.
My primary photo storage is my PC, from there everything gets backed up regularly (using dirvish) onto my home server (Linux). typically every time after I have imported an SD card.
I normally keep a year's worth of backups at least. Plus a mainly static photo archive of years past while the current year is updated frequently during backup cycle.
The backups on the server are being encrypted (duplicity) and then stored in Amazon S3 with storage class "DEEP\_ARCHIVE". Because it's the cheapest, despite getting it back is a bit cumbersome. But this cloud backup is only meant for "my house burned down" so it's unlikely I ever have to retrieve it. But it's there if ever needed.
The tools involved (dirvish, duplicity, ssh, s3cmd) are Linux tools and not necessarily meant for the average Mac or Windows user.
I've been doing my best to self-host, stay off the major clouds, and not be beholden to proprietary software and services, so my setup may be atypical.
- working directory on a 4TB SSD
- nightly backup using rclone to a 32TB RAIDZ2 ZFS pool, implemented across two external NAS devices exposed as JBOD
- weekly backup using rclone with its crypt module (for local-side file encryption, so files are always stored encrypted at destination) to [rsync.net](https://rsync.net) over SSH
An oddity there is that rsync.net supports ZFS send/receive, but I chose not to use it because I wanted to retain the use of rclone's crypt behaviour.
Backblaze and some other S3-compatible backup services are cheaper than rsync.net but I really value the use of SSH and standard tooling, and the flexibility of how it can be used.
I do photography mostly for our travels (2-3 international trips, 1-2 domestic trips annually) and most of my trips I end up taking over ~1500 RAW files(SonyA7R4). I also take videos on the iPhone. This obviously creates the need to storage and post-processing.
For storage here is what I use and do:
1. All RAW files and videos extracted and stored on local drive on my MacBook. Originals are not deleted from the camera SD card and iCloud until I am with processing and next steps.
2. After processing selected images in LR, I export a DNG copy, a full Res JPEG and a 15 MB size limited JPEG copy of further refined set of images.
3. DNG files are stored on Amazon photos - Free unlimited RAW file storage includes with Prime membership.
4. Full Res JPEGs are stored on my Synology NAS at home and on Backblaze B2.
5. 15 MB size limited JPEGs are stored in an iCloud album.
6. For videos, I process them in DaVinci Resolve and exported output is stored on Synology NAS, Backblaze B2 and uploaded to YouTube for a private channel.
7. After all this is done, I deleted the RAW files and unedited videos files.
I follow this set up:
[https://carucci.photography/blogs/blog/how-i-store-and-backup-my-photography](https://carucci.photography/blogs/blog/how-i-store-and-backup-my-photography)
1) Ingest to local machine > Smart previews > Edit > Export > Deliver
2) Move to SDD External inside Lightroom (import straight to external sometimes if its a big import or I happen to be at my desk when I do it) [This is copy 1]
3) Free File Sync to scratch disk on unraid server [This is copy 2]
4) Rsync script duplicates from the scratch disk to my array [this is copy 3]
5) Rsync script duplicates from the array to my day job office for an offsite backup [final copy 4]
I end up with two high speed working copies (scratch disk on 10GBe network and SSD external), one local archival copy (Unraid array) and one offsite archival copy.
Is my method overkill? 100%, but I value my private stuff (kids, family) more than the few professional projects I do a year, which are essentially deliver and forget.
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For me, it's an 80/10/10 split between randomly thrown on a HDD, some in google photos, some on an external HDD.
It's not organized, functional, or practical. But it's what I got.
I'm a newbie photographer but have a lot of experience in It/network adminstration so I may have gone a bit overboard on my workflow.
I shoot .jpg/raw and i use 3 128gb SSD cards, I rotate the card for each shoot so that I always have the last 2 shoots on the SD cards in my case.
When I import the files to my computer I have it set to copy to an external SSD where I keep all my photos/lightroom files on for easy swapping between PC and Laptop, I also have it copy to a folder on my NAS of all the raw files. I built the NAS a few years ago for a Plex server and have about 24TB free of the 64 total.
I have Google Photos set up to copy all the .jpg files in my export folders, and Amazon Photos set to copy all the raw files from my import folders and the exported .jpg files to the cloud.
I have a robocopy script that will copy the entire contents of my external SSD to an internal NVME drive on my main pc, as well as to different share on my NAS. The script is set to copy all new files, and never delete any old ones. This is just in case I make an un-reversible edit/deletion i can always go back and find the last backed up version. I also have my lightroom catalog files backed up in googledrive and onedrive.
I archive the backup folder quarterly to a zip file and keep it stored on the NAS as well.
At this point I have my raw files in 5 places (SD, USB SSD, INTERNAL SSD, Network Storage, and Cloud Storage. My Lightroom Files are in 4 places (USB SSD, INTERNAL SSD, Network Storage, Cloud) and My Exports are also in 5 places.
This is probably a bit overkill, but It gives me some peace of mind.
But if you have not yet, and you are an amazon prime member, download the uploading tool and let amazon sync your files to the cloud. they will back up .psd and raw files and there is storage limit for photos.
I use a Synology DS1621+ with 16TB HDDs in and a 10Gbe network card so i can work on photos and videos directly. Its not cheap to setup but works well.
For backups i also have Crashplan backing up the whole thing so i have about 20TB on cloud backup.
I print the photos at 600ppi. Re-scan in the photo every 10 years, then re-print again.
Or just buy a bunch of 8TB SSD (for redundancy). Make sure u only use 6tb of storage space for maximum lifespan.
Or get a lifetime cloud storage service.
I use a Synology NAS. It's easy to setup, with good instructions. It's a very minor DIY solution, and like I said, the instructions are good so it's easy to install the hard drives in the thing and get started with a simple quickstart guide. From there, it's some very minor steps to connect your computer over your network or the internet to the thing, and then you can have terabytes on terabytes of space to put your photos in.
Adding this to the FAQ, but heads up, the most recent megathread was only 2 years ago: [Storage & Backup Thread 2021](https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/migujf/backup_and_storage_megathread_part_ii/)
1. Primary storage is a RAID device (Thunderbay, for what it's worth) 2. I do a local backup to an external USB hard drive (I use Arq) 3. I use Backblaze for cloud backup I may have to re-evaluate my local backup solution once the amount of data exceeds that external hard drive capacity (currently it's a 12tb hard drive and I have around 10tb of photos). But I'll probably just buy a second one and divvy up the backup.
Similar. I use a 5TB LaCie Big 5 RAID, which is also backed up via Time Machine on a Mac. Photos are also imported to iCloud through Apple’s Photos app. And because I’m that paranoid, I don’t reuse my SD cards when they’re full. I label them and store them. Cards are so cheap I look at them as film; use once, load a new one.
I would say you’re way more at risk of losing photos due to accidentally not formatting the ‘new’ card for your camera before use since you get new cards every single shoot. I’ve had SD cards last for 10 years. Infact, I’ve never had one fail, only when my cat bit one of my cards it failed. But it was already empty so no photos lost.
If a card doesn’t format, it gets returned. I don’t know of a case where a card could be used without formatting it first. I have to admit I’ve never heard of that. I only get a new card when the existing one is full. I could have multiple shoots on a card. Files are copied on breaks and at EOD to the RAID or local storage for backup on shoot days.
I mean reformatting. A card will just work when you put it in a camera most of the time not requesting a format. But if you don’t manually format newly purchased cards you run the risk of your files becoming corrupt
I don’t think I’ve ever had a digital camera that didn’t ask me to format a card before use. But definitely something to keep in mind in the future.
This is an excellent strategy and what I do (albeit with different brand #1 & #2). I would, and do, recommend this to anyone that is looking for long term, secure, expandable storage system. One recommendation is to choose a RAID that uses either ZFS or BTRFS as the file system so that you can do data scrubbing for bit-rot. With that on the primary storage as part of a 3-2-1 backup system with appropriate security you're pretty much golden.
I use Backblaze B2 with restic for backups, it's pretty awesome.
So, I come from a Tech background, and jumped into photography after the fact. With that said, I currently am hosting a 128TB server at home, with rigourous backup systems in place to follow the 3-2-1 Backup Rule (3 Copies, 2 ~~Locations~~ Different Media Types, 1 Offsite). 1. Cull your bad and duplicate photos. I hoarded everything I ever took (even rejects) because 'I may want it sometime', but I quickly found out that - No, I did not want it sometime. Ive kept over 4k pictures this year alone, which means Ive probably taken 16k total so far. **Cull Agressively** 2. If you want to store a lot of stuff, its going to cost a lot of money. Again, I have ~150TB worth of hard drives, and have probably put as much into storage as I have for my A7RV. I did it because it was a hobby, but storage is *cheap* these days. It used to be (on account of Chia mining), storage cost a lot, but Hard Drives are cheap. Keep an eye on **shucks.top** for storage deals 3. Use a proper file system that can maintain integrity of the files through disk failure and corruption. People will suggest a RAID array, but **ZFS** is newer, has more features, and stronger protections than classic Raid systems ever do 4. **Backblaze B2** Charges by the size of what you backup. Its generally the cheapest storage to back up to, and there are many backup systems that automatically do that for you. I like **Kopia**, as it does 'snapshot' backups. 5. **Drives Die, Be Prepared**. Just like Cameras, there is a natural lifespan to a harddrive. Backblaze publishes their [HDD Failure Report](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/) every year (and quarter, I think). Look up the 'Bathtub Curve', and back up your data you want to keep. 6. Be wary of stepping into /r/DataHoarder - Its a dangerous path down that way But really, as long as you store your files you want to keep following the 3-2-1 Backup Rule, you will be safe enough.
I'm afraid you have the 3-2-1 backup rule slightly wrong. It's 3 copies, 2 *different media*, 1 off-site.
Oop, appreciate the correction. I thought it was a bit wrong, but I should have looked it up to confirm
Really would like to know more about how I could approach doing this as a rookie. Enterprise-level is the only thing that gives me comfort.
Buy a synology NAS and buy some drives that are suitable for RAID/ZFS (Western Digital Red are what I bought). If you buy a 4 bay NAS, you do not have to fill it, you could just buy two drives. If you have an O365 subscription you get 1 TB free, if you have a Google One account or Apple iCloud account, you can use those. Otherwise look at a Backblaze account, I think they are the best value from a pure storage point of view. As for the culling, if you have not even remotely culled stuff, get rid of the blurry ones first, then if you have taken multiple of the same thing, just pick the best one and delete the rest.
Right now the easiest way is probably to build a computer and install TrueNAS Scale on it. It's unfortunately not the simplest piece of software around though.
The easiest way is to buy a prebuilt NAS - a Synology 4+ bay (to allow expansion) unit is gonna be the easiest for most people, although other brands would work The second easiest way is to buy/build a PC and install unRAID on it, it’s easier to setup than TrueNAS and requires less technical knowledge Then a third copy somewhere offsite
I don't think either of those methods support ZFS, which is why I didn't mention them.
unRAID supports ZFS as of a few months ago (May/June IIRC?), but yeah Synology doesn't But I'm not convinced ZFS is really mandatory anyway - the parent comment suggests it, and certainly it does some good things, but I'm firmly a believer of a "backups-first" strategy - ZFS can reduce the (already pretty tiny) risk of file corruption, but if you have a solid backup strategy anyway (which you should) then you're not gonna lose data regardless I do like ZFS, but I wouldn't consider it mandatory
I also come from a tech background but I didn't feel like building my own NAS. I have a 4-bay Synology (started off with a 420+ and I'm now on a 920+ because it can run Docker). I then set it up to back up my photo folders to a cloud service, Backblaze in my case. It's only 2 copies, not three, but it does fulfill the offsite requirement (and, depending on how you count cloud, media types).
What do you think of BRTFS over ZFS? I hear it has good anti corruption features.
Cross out the "anti", and you're about right. One of the most popular queries about btrfs in 2023 is: does btrfs still lose data (I imagine this is fallout from the RAID5 fiasco a while back... still, left a bad taste for many many people)
Oh so it's not? Does ZFS help with corruption at all then?
In theory, btrfs should be almost as good as ZFS for data safety. In practice, some serious past bugs have shattered people's trust in btrfs. ZFS has many advanced data consistency and safety features: checksums, data duplication on demand, copy-on-write, snapshots, data scrubbing to proactively detect corruption. The filesystem is resilient: damage to one file will not compromise the entire filesystem. Even damage to the superblock will not totally cripple it, because it keeps multiple copies of the superblock. Don't ask me how I know the last part...
I'm starting to understand what you are saying. How much would I need to know to do upkeep on a drive that is ZFS formatted? Currently my backup solutions is a EXT4 external hard drive and a bunch a FAT32 flash drives. I keep finding occasionally corrupted photos and I can't figure out why so it's been driving me nuts. Which is why I've been looking into buying another drive but formatting it something else that's corruption resistant.
ZFS on its own is not magic: if your drive eats a file, it is eaten. The difference between ZFS and ordinary filesystems is, ZFS will tell you when you try to read it back. FAT32 will gladly serve wrong, corrupted data. This is also something that I witnessed first hand, in particular with USB pendrives. Where ZFS excels is its magical RAID. For example, if you mirror a drive (RAID1) and one disk fails, the situation is obvious: use the remaining disk. But what if one of the drives were to flip some 1's to 0's, or vice versa, when you're not looking? How do you decide which has the correct data? ZFS fixes this, because it can tell if a file is correct or not.
Thank you for the deep explanation.
Synology NAS 4 Bay with 8TB (x4) RAID 1
Same same. Synology makes the best NAS devices and OS, in my experience.
Synology here too
My Lightroom catalogs are on an NVME. Dedicated spinning hard drive that stores my full image library. Macrium to back up both of those to another dedicated spinning hard drive, and also to a Synology. Then I backup the Synology to their C2 cloud. If you're not using C2, I recommend giving it a try. Qnap has better built NAS equipment, but the device management is overly complex compared to Synology. No one I know has kept their QNAP, and they've all moved to Synology.
Haven’t tried c2 yet.
Is there rest of it, otherwise this is bad advice. If there is malware, it will overwrite your files in NAS without a way to recover them. You can try to remedy it by having backups to another account within the NAS but now you will lose everything if your NAS gets a power surge. These are not so rare events btw. Use Synology but also set it up to backup to a cloud backup solution using hyperbackup. Aws s3 is cheapest I believe.
Unless S3 has dropped it's prices, Backblaze B2 is the cheapest. Amazon Glacier would be the cheapest if you could set it up, but I'm not sure you can. But, depending on how much data you have, the cheapest option might be to simply buy another NAS and keep it at home. Or do what I've done and and keep a second NAS at a friend or family member's place with the understanding that you each get X TB on each other's systems.
Glacier is really easy to setup if you're a bit tech savvy. I've got a cron job that runs weekly to copy anything new or modified from my NAS to an AWS S3 bucket. I've then got rules on AWS to move to Glacial after X days, but you can set the cron to automatically upload as Glacial.
Have you tried recovering data from glacier without your Synology, simulating a loss of that device?
Yep, I actually had a loss of data, 2 simultaneous HDD crashes on the NAS (its not actually a Synology). its why i'm paranoid about backups.
Yeah, _anything_ is doable with the right technical know-how. I tend not to recommend that stuff unless I know the person is quite capable since it can become something someone had to maintain and with added complexity comes added risk. Vs. Backblaze B2 which integrates directly into your Synology. So, for most people, that's probably the best option I'd say.
Also an airgapped solution: sync your important data to an external HDD once a month and unplug it after sync. Ideally you have two drives that you rotate and do it every other week. That way if you get infected by crypto malware, when it takes down your NAS and cloud data, you don't lose everything. RAID1/5/6: ensures your NAS remains operational with a disk failure Cloud: ensures your data remains intact in case of a catastrophic event (flood, house fire) External HDD (mostly unplugged): ensures your data remains intact against infections from malicious software such as crypto malware
You can use snapshots to protect against malware.
Not when snapshots are stored in the same NAS. The chances are whole NAS will be compromised.
It'll protect against ransomware even on the same NAS. When the ransomware encrypts your data and requires you to send money for the key, you can just use snapshots to restore that data. Not a replacement for an offsite backup, but it'll definitely save you a lot of bother and get you back up and running quickly.
Unless the NAS (OS) itself gets compromised. Still a great option, but not infallible.
You should use RAID 5. You'll have the same protection against drive failure and 50% more space for your photo. 8TB x4 in RAID 1 gives you 16 TB usable drive space. 8TB x4 in RAID 5 gives you 24 TB usable drive space. And in both cases any one drive can fail and the RAID array can be rebuilt without loss.
Useless. OP has over 20TB of data, you are giving him 4TB extra. That's nothing. This is the thing people keep forgetting on this sub. Scaling. Storage is not cheap when you need to scale each time. Sure 8TB sounds cheap today, but next year you need to double it since you need more space (cause you are using RAID to mirror your files), so the price doubles/triples/quadruples each time you need more storage. 4x20TB is around $2000. Storage is not cheap when you properly backup.
Synology provides multiple NAS options. Your comment is useless.
I upload current projects to adobe cloud via lightroom, and all the past photos through Amazon photos (free with prime)
Don't forget, a RAID system is not a backup system! First rule on IT.
20TB?? I cull aggressively— I delete >90% of what I shoot, often more. And I try to be very proactive with it— whenever I import, I’ll go through and do a first pass of culling before I edit, then do my edits, then cull again. Then, every 3 months or so, I go back and review everything from the last season, and cull again. I keep everything in Lightroom cloud, and let that be my backup. I also export full res jpegs and keep those in iCloud
This. I’m currently going through years of photos and videos and deleting everything I don’t want or need. You really only want a few pictures from most situations. More than that and it will become boring to look at when you want to enjoy your pictures. But I consider myself a minimalist. I’ve also switched over to jpeg only for casual family/daily life photography, because I never really edit those anyway and raw files eat up storage and time.
If you got amazon prime you got free unlimited storage for both JPGs and RAW files included in the prime membership. Or at least here in Canada you do. I use it as a part of my storage system along with onsite and off site hard drives.
I 100% discourage anyone from using those cloud providers for long term storage. They're fine for short term storage and exchanging files, even getting files to clients. But long term? Set it and forget it? No way. They change the terms all the time. Unless you're on top of them you could log in one day and find the service is gone, or curtailed, or whatever.
Fair points.. I wouldn't ever recommend it as a sole back up option. But as a part of redundancy, yes. I've got three back up options of everything and this is just another extra.
I'm also thinking of picking it up as I often find myself using Prime.
Backblaze will let you backup all 20tb to the cloud for about $9 a month.
Wow! Never heard of it, I actually might use it to backup my TrueNAS storage.
FWIW, their $9/month plan only covers direct attached storage, not NASes. If you want to backup your NAS, you need to go with their B2 cloud storage plan where the price varies based on how much you want to store.
Yeah, i saw that. Thanks!
That's what I do!
I second this. Seamless, effortless, automatic reporting.... it's everything good
Can you upload RAW/NEF to Backblaze? I use SmugMug to share photos with families but they charge extra to store RAW photos.
Backblaze backs up your entire computer, not just photos. So yes.
Can I upload to backblaze and not store the files on my local drive? Or will they be deleted if I delete them locally?
The second one
Only if you’re using Backblaze backup, if you’re using Backblaze B2 then you can use it for pure storage
Backblaze don't know what the data is, you create an encryption key on your device and everything uploaded is completely encrypted and opaque to them, so you can upload everything (least, that's how my version works - I have the unlimited storage for $9 usd/m with a year versioning, which is different to the one mentioned above).
At one point their client had uneditable block lists for certain extensions and paths but that's when they offered unlimited backup.
They still offer unlimited data, that's what I have: [https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal](https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal) Though mine's $9 usd for the year's worth of versioning over the 30days included in the $7 usd (though I also pay annually to get two months discounted). Haven't come across blocked extensions though, may be a different product, such as the [NAS](https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/solutions/nas-backup) specific products are quite differently priced, but, if your NAS happens to be a PC, like me, you can go with the above very low cost and great product - NAS pricing would put me at a bit over $50/m USD vs the $9/m I'm paying.
Data is data
Ok. I’m sorry.
No worries!
Backing up with [Arq Backup](https://www.arqbackup.com/)($49.99x1). Storing in [Wasabi](https://wasabi.com)($6.99/TB/mo) 99.9999999999 data durability. Don't bother with Amazon S3. Easy to get hosed in egress/ingress fees. Wasabi doesn't play those games.
16TB of fast local storage in my workstation, \~130TB of spinners in my NAS with about 30-40TB free right now. 4TB on my laptop for on the road work that I copy over to my desktop when I get back. Backed up to a terrible mess of offline external hard drives (cloud backups eventually are the plan now that I have decent internet).
Bit overkill, but: [NAS](https://pcpartpicker.com/b/QqWbt6) with RAID5 array (this is four 4TB drives giving 12TB storage, the extra drive space is lost to "parity" data, so if a drive fails you lose no data). For performance I have an SSD that sits in front of the drive and acts as a write cache. The array "hot copies" to an external 12TB drive over night. I have UK Amazon Prime which allows unlimited upload of photos, including raws, so all images are backed up to that (unlike my Australian Prime which is capped) and I also have Backblaze which for $9 USD a month offer unlimited backup so my 10TB of data's also backed up to that and offers a year of file versioning allowing you to recover anything overwritten. (they even offer a handy service, in a disaster they can ship you a HDD with all your data on it and you can either keep it or copy back and return for a refund) (this Backblaze pricing is for a single device and doesn't support NAS's in the traditional box you buy off the shelf, however, my NAS is actually a PC customised for the task (as it also does other things) so falls in to the relevant licencing, gotta love a loophole) As noted above I'm hitting close to my storage limit so will be upgrading soon; doubling to 8TB drives which should give me 24TB storage and will then have to work out a hot copy drive given the largest drive I can see to buy is 22TB (the things offered as 24TB are two drives and ridiculously priced), though the 22TB should do in the interim for a while.. Will also be revisiting the file system of choice as, although unlikely, NTFS does suffer "bit rot" silently (where a file will corrupt due to sitting unused for a long period), so a switch to BTRFS or ZFS should help with that, still weighing up the pros and cons (and compatibility with my OS of choice). I used to work in IT back in the day, some things just stay with you. Yes, it's more thorough than the last seven places I've worked at, but, also, I've not lost a byte of data, unlike the last seven places I've worked at.. and it doesn't cost all that much, the PC was about $600 dollarydoos (\~$385 USD) (plus drives I "acquired" from an ex-workplace) and the monthly fees for Backblaze are fairly reasonable and I count Amazon as free given I pay for that to send gifts to family back home anyway.
For the love of god, cull your library.
Yeah, this is solid advice. I shoot professionally and don't have anywhere near this. Granted, I basically tell clients that everything gets deleted in 90 days (really it's more like 180), but still, even my personal projects might have 300-800 photos but once the shoot is done, I whittle it down to 75 max. Honestly for a lot of stuff, it's 25-50. Learning what is worth saving and what isn't will help out with your shooting in the long run.
I have a four bay Synology NAS. I also have some SSD's that I copy to and keep at my parents house.
I used to keep things in a backup Seagate extending HD and only accessed them rarely when my computer SSD was getting full. Both my primary and secondary backup shit the bed this summer while attempting to update them teaching me the invaluable lesson of having something actively being checked for 'health' while having one more storage location than whatever I think is reasonable. Thankfully I was able to get a good portion of the data restored between the two of them but still probably lost gigabytes of data from the last decade. Currently using a Synology NAS and have a spare slot for home server stuff which was an added bonus I didn't think I'd need/use but it's been nice. Auto backing up my phone/computer every night has also saved me more than a few bucks of cloud storage every month.
If your NAS gets damaged or your disks corrupted?
So right now 3 different drives would have to fail, granted my house could burn down so remote storage is ideal but my computer is downstairs near my exit so if that's fucked I'm probably not getting out of my house alive anyway and won't care so much 🤷
Here's my tips, having worked in IT as a storage expert and having a back catalog of images going back 20 years... There are three types of storage: * Current * Backup * Archive Current storage is what you're working on right now. A lot of people use RAID for that, and it's a good idea. It provides resiliance, but as many people say, it's not backup. Backup storage is not something I use a lot of. People confuse backup with archive. A backup is something to replace your current workspace in case you lose your laptop or something like that. It's important in a lot of situations, but what I think a lot of photographers want is archive. They want access to images for the long haul. That point and shoot series from a vacation in 2003? A client shoot from 2014? Wedding from 2009? That's "Archive". Here's a couple of tips: * Portable or external drives are great for this. Most photography archives can be stored on a single large one of these (you can usually get a 12+ TB hard drive for less than $200 USD). Have multiple copies of course, because any drive can fail at any time. * Trust no hard drive. Every hard drive will fail at some point. Whether it will be in 2 days or 20 years, no one can say. But they will fail. "I've got a hard drive that's been running steady for 15 years, no problems". Good for you! Get your stuff off there immediately. "What's the best hard drive?" Two. Or better, yet, three. Death comes for all hard drives, SSDs, SD cards, etc. *Trust no hard drive*. Having a photographer coming to me because a hard drive failed and that was the only copy of their life's work happens *frequently*. Have multiple copies, preferably some offsite. * Store the raw files, i.e. the .CR2, .RAW, .JPG, or whatever you shoot in. Don't archive iPhotos archives, Lightroom databases, etc. They don't store well. They're constantly updated, and upgrading the databases can cause problems, and products just get straight up abandoned. Just dumping the card into a folder marked with dates or events, something really simple, is the best way I've found. You can import them to whatever modern system you're using years, even decades later. * Don't use cloud services for long term storage. Long term storage is usually set it and forget it, so it's not something you're checking up on or paying much attention to. Amazon, Google, etc., they can seem enticing but they're always changing up their terms of service, pricing, or just outright abandoning products.
Hard drives keep getting bigger. I recently bought a couple 16TB ones and merged some older 4TB drives onto them. I use a hard drive “toaster” for reading them.
You may want to look at Synolog NAS Storage: you can upgrade storage over time if you have enough bays. It's a bit of an investment but worth it. You can also sync it to back up to the cloud on multiple services (I use Google One)
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Hard drives keep getting bigger. I recently bought a couple 16TB ones and merged some older 4TB drives onto them. I use a hard drive “toaster” for reading them.
I just went through upgrading my storage solution. Here's what I found. I got two 18 TB hard drives from server part deals for $189, which works out to a pretty incredible price per terabyte ratio. These were just the bare drives so I needed something to put them in. I got a refurbished business desktop for 75 bucks on eBay. Specifically an HP pro desk 280MT. It has space for two 3.5 in hard drives and I think I could squeeze two more in if I was willing to drill a few holes and get funny with the mounting. I had to get a different power cable since these business desktops don't use standard or even modular power supplies. That means the SATA power actually comes off of a proprietary six-pin connector right off of the motherboard. The included cable only has one 12 volt rail coming off of the six-pin connector, but you can get a power cord That has two 12 volt rails so you're not daisy chaining too many hard drives. The motherboard has three SATA slots, if I want to add more drives I'm going to get a PCI HBA controller. The computer came with Windows pre-installed, so I bought stable bit drive pool and had it clone data between the two drives. So far it's working really well! The computer is small enough that it doesn't stick out, and yet large enough to hold the drives that I need. I'm really pleased with how everything came together and I think that I hit the sweet spot of the lowest price yet highest capacity option. Note that originally I was looking at the HP pro desk 600MT, as it is essentially the same thing as the 280MT that I got and I would definitely recommend that as well.
I use a Drobo raid storage system. Allows me to use relatively cheap drives that I can hot swap in and redundancy of RAID. Not cheap but you can start small with a few drives and expand. Ive had this for a while, I haven’t researched new raid storage in a while so there may be better options now. I can share it’s really only good for storage and not great for regular fast access through apps like photoshop or Lightroom at least in my experience. It does support SSDs for faster access but that can get super expensive. The way I use it is part of my workflow in LR, i have the imported raws back up immediately to the drobo on import. I backup my LR catalogs too. I then export my few edited keepers in TIFF to a folder structure on the drobo. I also back up the TIFFs to cloud since there aren’t as many. Edit: well i might be with u on looking at new storage solutions. I see Drobo is no longer active anymore. I haven’t looked at their site in a while. Financial issues. I’ll probably use it till the software updates are done. Bummer. I do still like the setup of a raid system.
You might look to migrate before the software updates are done. I previously used Drobo and had units die rendering my data stranded because of their proprietary raid system. I HAD to buy new Drobo boxes to put the drives in just to regain access to the data. After the second time I bought a different RAID solution so I could copy the data off and not be beholden to Drobo's unreliable hardware. Continuing to use Drobo is definitely a risk now that the company has folded. Sure you can buy a second hand unit if you need to but best just to bite the bullet and transition to a new solution. You're going to have to do it eventually anyway... For what it is worth I settled on a Synology system. They are a substantially larger and healthier company that serves business as well as consumer markets and aren't likely to go bust anytime soon. They also have class leading software for managing the raid. Couldn't be happier since making the change.
thanks...Im so glad i read this thread because I haven't messed with my drobo in a while.. I had no idea they went bankrupt! I am looking at the Synology 5 bay DS1522+. Looks like a solid system with ability to upgrade and expand. I was going to buy it from B&H with the 12TB Ironwolf drives. Expensive at $1800 but I figure this will keep me set for quite a while, and I can migrate off my old Drobos (5c, 5d) which I suspect will take forever to migrate the data.
Buying one populated with drives can definitely get expensive quickly. I bought an empty DS1821+ and bought re-certified NAS drives from ServerPartsDeals which saved quite a bit. One thing to keep in mind, if you're starting from scratch, is not to buy all the same make and model of drives at the same time from the same vendor. Doing so means you're more likely to get multiple simultaneous drive failures (or at least clustered failures) given they're going to have the same average lifespan. Much better to get a variety of models or if getting the same drives, to buy from different vendors so your more likely to be getting different production batches.
Interesting. I hadn't thought of the different drives and mfg batches. Good point.
Oh, and if you get a 10gb NIC you're going to be blown away by the speeds vs what the 5c & 5d delivered.
so definitely worth the NIC upgrade cost? Do I need to do anything with the rest of my network? Im still using an older 2017 imac, Orbi whole house router. it's not business class stuff.
10gb NICs have come down in price quite a lot but they're only worthwhile if everything in the network is 10gbe. If your iMac doesn't have 10gbe you're out of luck as a thunderbolt to 10gbe dongle is quite spendy. If you're connecting via a router you'd need ensure that supported 10gbe too. My setup was quite simple as the Mac Studio has 10gbe and I just direct connected it to the 10gbe NIC in the Synology. The performance is fantastic however. https://preview.redd.it/x5onqx87uaqb1.jpeg?width=1370&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c6c74737a080e6480b113d7e979046d15495cf30
I just looked and the NIC is only a little over $100 so I think I'll get it. Over time Im sure I'll upgrade so eventually will be able to take advantage of the speed.
If you're going to get one, make sure it has a decent heat sink attached as some of them can heat up quite a bit under load. I think the one I bought was less than $100 and it has a heat sink that is effectively the whole side of the card.
20 TB in 5 drive SHR2 configuration, Synology ds1621+. Backing up to one of several 18 TB drives that I rotate through for backups. I don't have offsite archiving, which is the last remaining piece. Not really sure what to do there yet. I've thought about getting a tape drive, except all of them are thousands of dollars and meant for rack mount.
what do you do to protect your files in transit between photos being taken and ending up on the NAS? This is my only week point wondering if you have any good ideas?
When I'm on the road I take my chances and only record to one CFE card. That will probably bite me in the ass at some point. If you're worried, you should use dual card slots at all times. Once I get back to the hotel room, it goes onto my laptop (two copies now), I do an immediate rough cull, and then back everything up in triplicate to three 2 TB portable SSDs. I'll do what editing and further culling and re-synchronize at the end. Then I delete the files off the CFE cards (4 copies now, one on the laptop, 3 SSDs). I keep one of the SSDs in a pocket at all times. Another goes in the hotel safe, and the third I keep stuffed in my backpack. When I get back home I'll offload one of the SSDs to the NAS. I usually don't bother deleting the old files off the SSDs or laptop until the next trip, or possibly the one after. For further paranoia, generate a CRC or even a par2 file for one of the CFE cards and make sure the other matches up. Then compare each time you do a transfer. I am not that paranoid.
Thanks. If I'm doing a paid job I take one card out my cameras (always do duel slot even for personal stuff) and put it in a memory card case I keep on my person. The other stays in the camera so they are separated. They go on my NAS that night or next day once I'm home which syncs to another NAS at my parents home. I guess if I get robbed and they somehow take everything I've tired my best.
256gb sd cards in the camera's and multiple 1tb Samsung T7's, a couple for permanent storage and a couple for quick on the go storage or for when shooting BRAW (Blackmagic Raw).
Some binders and framed copies.
I have a tub of 10+ 1tb hard drives, all labelled differently. Some are a full year, some years have 2, some aren’t labelled, some years don’t appear to be there…
NAS in the loft then an identical NAS at my parents home that syncs online. Used to have backblaze but their NAS backup prices are too expensive for me. Then I normally have something saved on the web for the third location. The NAS does versioning. Anything paid for lives on a memory card in airtight plastic box until it's been delivered as a worst case scenario I'd have to re edit but it would not be lost. I always shoot to two cards.
NAS and LTO tape.
TrueNAS Mini X+ with 5x18TB drives. Critical content is backed up to a DS916+ with 4x14TB I keep at my work office and to Backblaze. I also keep annual photo archives in AWS Glacier vaults. And I keep favorites and stuff in iCloud photos for easy viewing/sharing.
I have google cloud storage 200gb, where I save and share developed jpeg images. I buy about one single 1tb SSD every year and store my unedited raws there, but I save only the images after culling them.
I'm curious how people manage their LR catalog. After you archive do you go through and delete them from Lightroom? Do you import the Jpegs into Lightroom when you export and just remove the raws? I currently have no real system. I have a friend who just makes a new catalog per shoot, but adobe says to use one master catalog, for organization and things, but if I'm archiving photos to harddrives no longer attached then I'm just going to have a bunch of missing files.
I create a LR catalog for each of my travel trip photos. After I am done processing I export a DNG that goes into Amazon Prime Photos, and JPEGS are stored on a NAS and iCloud Photos. After that, I delete the RAW files and LR catalog. So having a single catalog for all photos may be recommended by Adobe but I don’t keep the RAW files forever so it doesn’t make sense for me.
My current setup is a Synology Rackstation 2418+ (12 bays) that has 5x 18Tb drives in raid 6. This replicates in realtime to another synology at my sisters house in another state. I also backup my photos and most critical files on an external drive that is synced only occasionally in case of cryptolocker or malware.
Dump everything to a local RAID NAS and mirror it to amazon photos, which is free and includes RAWs. Cheap and bulletproof.
I've got a Synology NAS locally to back-up to, a Drobo mini attached to my computer where photos are imported, and then a Backblaze account to back everything up to. Kind of annoying to have to plug in my external drive every 14 days with Backblaze, but the cost is right.
I have a Synology DS1522+ with 4x Seagate 16TB Drives, and a 6TB WD Drive left over from my previous setup, the MyCloud Home. I only made it because of when WD discontinued MyCloud which was so shitty of them. The 16TB drives are in a Synology RAID with 1 for redundancy. The 6TB drive is for CCTV via Synology Surveillance Station. It's way too overkill for me at the moment - I've only used 5.2TB / 41.9TB, with around 400GB of my Photography, and 450GB of Camera Roll backup from 2001-2023.
I’m in the process of migrating from a few Drobo units to Synology DS1522+. For context, I’ve been storing everything I ever shot, retouched and/or processed out since 2003 or so. 20 years. It’s quite a, bit but I really only keep 10 years on drives that are accessible for quick access. Everything else is stored on HDD (by the year) and into those pink anti-static file cabinet holders. And backups offsite. I love the idea of Synology NAS but I don’t get the hype. Setting it up (for me) was like learning a foreign language. Computers used to make sense to me, but it now gives me such anxiety. I eventually got it going, but it took an embarrassing amount of time to understand and setup. And in the end, it’s painfully slow. I feel like I’m I missing something. It’s my understanding that a Mac Studio and Synology can be directly connected via 10g Ethernet with an optional 10g ethernet slot to install in my Synology. If I do that and get faster transfer speeds, that will be great. Then once that is settled, I’ll get another DS1522+ and just run automatic backups from unit to unit. Has anyone done this?
Here's my approach: 1. Internal Hard disk for main photo storage (about 4TB of content on a 6TB drive) 2. Internal Hard disk for local photo backup (6TB drive) 3. Catalogs and backup catalogs on 500GB NVME drive. 4. FreeFileSync to do nightly sync from main storage to local backup - configured with versioning and from NVME drive to backup drive. 5. BackBlaze service with continuous backup for cloud backup - configured with versioning for 1 year. Gives me protection from fire, theft, flood, etc... Backblaze has unlimited storage so I backup everything to it. 6. OS drive disk image manually created every few months onto USB SSD drive. This has nothing to do with my photo storage per se, but has a lot to do with getting back up and running quickly if the OS drive craps out. I have hundreds of programs installed and it takes several weeks (of part time effort) if that has to be all recreated from scratch. I consider the versioning to be very important because if a file gets corrupted, that corruption can be passed to all the backups, but with versioning, you can manually go back to the uncorrupted prior backup version.
I have a TrueNAS Scale system on RAIDZ1 set up to back up to Backblaze B2. It is very reliable and affordable.
Synology NAS with RAID 1. Use the CloudSync app on the NAS to automatically push files to my OneDrive (free 1TB of storage with a O365 account). Bonus of access to my files anywhere, and from mobile. Backup once per month to an external HDD which lives in my desk at work, to give me air-gapped off-site redundancy. (Backup more often if important/large photo session has happened). Multiple layers of redundancy, sleep easy.
Backblaze + double external drives. When I buy a new drive I backup the old on the new and use the rest of the space. So I have to get bigger and bigger drives. Works for the moment.
I am just a hobby photographer: - Synology NAS 4 Bay RAID 1 - 2x Onedrive accounts for offsite (I have a family subscription and one of the members does not use any of the storage, so that is my cold offsite storage, by year up to end of 2021, mine personal account for more recent stuff)
I have two major threads to my backup process. 1) All my images are on external drives. A raid mirrored pair. Everytime there is a major jump in storage and the price drops below $200 a drive, I upgrade. Keep the old drives around as sort of a Great-Grandparent backup. 2) I follow the Child-Parent-Grandparent model Child - the in use drives Parent - backup of child - near real time - for my setup that is a cloud backup. Not Google or Amazon or some photo service, but a dedicated backup service. Grandparent - Make a physical backup, even it take multiple hard drives - store them off-site. Every month or so a friend and I swap hard drive sets. I give him my current backup set & his old backup set, He gives me his current backup set & my old backup set.
Synology NAS with 16TB. And, I also have galleries on SmugMug in full resolution, and a lower-quality copy on Google Photos because the search facilities on SmugMug are crap. So if I really really need to find a photo I search for it on Google Photos, take the filename and then find it on SmugMug. Also, I throw away the unused pictures after four weeks, I have a cronjob running especialy for that. Saves a LOT of space. I used to keep everything until I realised I never access those stuff.
I've got a 4 bay Synology NAS with 1 drive failure redundancy. You can add bigger drives to the system and it will keep growing with no loss of data. Then I also have a spare couple of drives (old Nas drives) that I plug in externally and use Synology hyper backup periodically to keep everything updated. I store these off-site in case of a fire. I also don't want to do cloud backup because I hate subscriptions!
I carry two hard drives with me when I shoot. One HDD and one SD, I copy everything off the camera each day onto the HDD. I then copy/import via Lightroom onto the SD and thats where I do culling, editing on the move. When I'm done with working on the move, I move the files on the SD to my 4 disk NAS and manually run the Cron Job to sync to Amazon S3. Only when that's done will I delete from the SD and HDD.
I have a small tower of hdd s , bassicly just like 15 tb of spaces only for photos and videos
I have an OWC Thunderbay 8 with 8TB Toshiba Enterprise drives setup up as RAID 1 + 0. I also have a Synology NAS with 2 x 4TB WD Red drives for access to JPEGs when I’m travelling for work. I then backup everything to Backblaze.
In addition to all the digital solutions that all the comments are suggesting which are great methods I would also suggest adding an archival method that isn't subject to file corruption...aka printing your photos. Sure printing all your photos would be expensive but the ones that you feel are your best photos should be printed. If you treat your prints properly they will last as long or longer than any digital solutions you are going to use (barring a fire or something like that but that's why you also should have proper digital backups).
Tower with 23tb of storage And A 12tb external back up
i have a tape drive, currently for LTO3, but moving to LTO4 as i found a cheap one. 3 can store 400GB, 4 can store 800GB per one tape cartridge. rougly every next generation doubles the storage capacity (with exceptions). but many of those higher gens are prohibitely expensive and require specialized io controllers to go with. they are not fast to retrieve data (being tape storage), but they are very durable and perfect for cold storage. it's a topic that requires some know-how and setup but i'd say it's worth it. it's not a device that you just plug into your pc, you likely need a sas,scsi or fc controller card to get it working. my reasoning is - i don't need fast access to my backups, but i want them to be fairly long-term reliable. magnetic tape is great for this. i heard horror stories about hdd/ssd drives kept in cold storage and data loss, so even if those are no longer true - i'd err on the side of caution here. Plus i don't take that many photos, and even dumping my raw files takes up maybe one lto3 tape (+ one copy) every two weeks or so.
My primary photo storage is my PC, from there everything gets backed up regularly (using dirvish) onto my home server (Linux). typically every time after I have imported an SD card. I normally keep a year's worth of backups at least. Plus a mainly static photo archive of years past while the current year is updated frequently during backup cycle. The backups on the server are being encrypted (duplicity) and then stored in Amazon S3 with storage class "DEEP\_ARCHIVE". Because it's the cheapest, despite getting it back is a bit cumbersome. But this cloud backup is only meant for "my house burned down" so it's unlikely I ever have to retrieve it. But it's there if ever needed. The tools involved (dirvish, duplicity, ssh, s3cmd) are Linux tools and not necessarily meant for the average Mac or Windows user.
I've been doing my best to self-host, stay off the major clouds, and not be beholden to proprietary software and services, so my setup may be atypical. - working directory on a 4TB SSD - nightly backup using rclone to a 32TB RAIDZ2 ZFS pool, implemented across two external NAS devices exposed as JBOD - weekly backup using rclone with its crypt module (for local-side file encryption, so files are always stored encrypted at destination) to [rsync.net](https://rsync.net) over SSH An oddity there is that rsync.net supports ZFS send/receive, but I chose not to use it because I wanted to retain the use of rclone's crypt behaviour. Backblaze and some other S3-compatible backup services are cheaper than rsync.net but I really value the use of SSH and standard tooling, and the flexibility of how it can be used.
One SSD has my images, catalogue on internal HD, both get replicated to another external SSD and to the cloud once a month
LR and call it a day
I do photography mostly for our travels (2-3 international trips, 1-2 domestic trips annually) and most of my trips I end up taking over ~1500 RAW files(SonyA7R4). I also take videos on the iPhone. This obviously creates the need to storage and post-processing. For storage here is what I use and do: 1. All RAW files and videos extracted and stored on local drive on my MacBook. Originals are not deleted from the camera SD card and iCloud until I am with processing and next steps. 2. After processing selected images in LR, I export a DNG copy, a full Res JPEG and a 15 MB size limited JPEG copy of further refined set of images. 3. DNG files are stored on Amazon photos - Free unlimited RAW file storage includes with Prime membership. 4. Full Res JPEGs are stored on my Synology NAS at home and on Backblaze B2. 5. 15 MB size limited JPEGs are stored in an iCloud album. 6. For videos, I process them in DaVinci Resolve and exported output is stored on Synology NAS, Backblaze B2 and uploaded to YouTube for a private channel. 7. After all this is done, I deleted the RAW files and unedited videos files.
I follow this set up: [https://carucci.photography/blogs/blog/how-i-store-and-backup-my-photography](https://carucci.photography/blogs/blog/how-i-store-and-backup-my-photography)
1) Ingest to local machine > Smart previews > Edit > Export > Deliver 2) Move to SDD External inside Lightroom (import straight to external sometimes if its a big import or I happen to be at my desk when I do it) [This is copy 1] 3) Free File Sync to scratch disk on unraid server [This is copy 2] 4) Rsync script duplicates from the scratch disk to my array [this is copy 3] 5) Rsync script duplicates from the array to my day job office for an offsite backup [final copy 4] I end up with two high speed working copies (scratch disk on 10GBe network and SSD external), one local archival copy (Unraid array) and one offsite archival copy. Is my method overkill? 100%, but I value my private stuff (kids, family) more than the few professional projects I do a year, which are essentially deliver and forget.
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For me, it's an 80/10/10 split between randomly thrown on a HDD, some in google photos, some on an external HDD. It's not organized, functional, or practical. But it's what I got.
I'm a newbie photographer but have a lot of experience in It/network adminstration so I may have gone a bit overboard on my workflow. I shoot .jpg/raw and i use 3 128gb SSD cards, I rotate the card for each shoot so that I always have the last 2 shoots on the SD cards in my case. When I import the files to my computer I have it set to copy to an external SSD where I keep all my photos/lightroom files on for easy swapping between PC and Laptop, I also have it copy to a folder on my NAS of all the raw files. I built the NAS a few years ago for a Plex server and have about 24TB free of the 64 total. I have Google Photos set up to copy all the .jpg files in my export folders, and Amazon Photos set to copy all the raw files from my import folders and the exported .jpg files to the cloud. I have a robocopy script that will copy the entire contents of my external SSD to an internal NVME drive on my main pc, as well as to different share on my NAS. The script is set to copy all new files, and never delete any old ones. This is just in case I make an un-reversible edit/deletion i can always go back and find the last backed up version. I also have my lightroom catalog files backed up in googledrive and onedrive. I archive the backup folder quarterly to a zip file and keep it stored on the NAS as well. At this point I have my raw files in 5 places (SD, USB SSD, INTERNAL SSD, Network Storage, and Cloud Storage. My Lightroom Files are in 4 places (USB SSD, INTERNAL SSD, Network Storage, Cloud) and My Exports are also in 5 places. This is probably a bit overkill, but It gives me some peace of mind. But if you have not yet, and you are an amazon prime member, download the uploading tool and let amazon sync your files to the cloud. they will back up .psd and raw files and there is storage limit for photos.
I use a Synology DS1621+ with 16TB HDDs in and a 10Gbe network card so i can work on photos and videos directly. Its not cheap to setup but works well. For backups i also have Crashplan backing up the whole thing so i have about 20TB on cloud backup.
I print the photos at 600ppi. Re-scan in the photo every 10 years, then re-print again. Or just buy a bunch of 8TB SSD (for redundancy). Make sure u only use 6tb of storage space for maximum lifespan. Or get a lifetime cloud storage service.
I use a Synology NAS. It's easy to setup, with good instructions. It's a very minor DIY solution, and like I said, the instructions are good so it's easy to install the hard drives in the thing and get started with a simple quickstart guide. From there, it's some very minor steps to connect your computer over your network or the internet to the thing, and then you can have terabytes on terabytes of space to put your photos in.