Keeping Your Photos Safe and Secure

Ahoy!

For image storage that's free, fully customisable plus you can link to images and have separate folders and create slideshows etc, I use Joomeo.

Works for me even though I have a 500GB external HDD.

A lot has changed since this article was written. Storage options are better than way back then, drives are bigger and more reliable than ever before. SSD storage and RAID configurations can offer faster/increased redundancy, depending on which way you go.

And for the win, some vendors offer robust backup solutions with their products. Excellent.

These days I have a Synology Rackstation as the primary location for my image files. This runs four drives in a fault tolerant array with the option of additional drives when the time comes. I've been using these devices since 2010 and found them to be completely reliable. And yes, I appreciate that nothing is safe unless it exists in at least two places. I have a huge collection of DVD archives as well.

All my audio CD's and DVD's are ripped to the NAS as well, so it stores more than just images. We are fully embracing the digital lifestyle here with a NAD M10, but that's a whole different story.

With ON1 (Lightroom previously) and proper attention to metadata tagging, images are at the fingertips quite literally.

Synology NAS

Just as an "I told you so", NAS hard drive crashed. it's a logical fail, not a physical fail but I've ordered two bigger ones since its now five years old anyway.

My fault since I shut the unit down to clean the dust from the drive bays and cocked something up when I took them out and put them back.

Anyway, remarkably and despite the horror story in the image below... there has been no interruption to service, no data lost. I'll pop the new drives in one at a time and rebuild the volume. That will be about 16TB of storage then, or at least 12 once its built the new drives into the volume.

Let this be a lesson to all of us.

Similar to Keith_h, I've just invested in a Synology NAS and I want to sing from the roof tops about how great this thing is. Keith's image of his rack looks very IT expert, but my DS920 is very much a consumer unit with easily slid in HDDs. For a very long time I've struggled with my photography archiving. I had a process that was acceptable to me, which broadly went something like this...

Current year
- annual catalogue storing all images for current calendar year (firstly on Aperture 3, more recently CaptureOne)
- Best photos uploaded to private or public galleries of my website
- Backed up via time machine and occasional direct copy of catalogue

End of year
- re-audit all catalogue images and delete superfluous ones
- Build digital album of family photos shortlisted for annual printed phonebook (typically 5-6k photos shortlisted, circa 1k in the book)
- upload all 5-6k to a private cloud space
- Export all RAW images and processed JPGs in top quality to year folder and save on two external HDDs (one stored at home, one off site)

So while I have all images safe, if I need a particular image, it's a manual process of digging out the old hard drive or hoping I uploaded it to my website. Plus, I really missed the face recognition and places tools in Aperture 3 that let me view all images of a person or a place as and when I wanted.

Skip forward to today and having the Synology NAS and I've copied all my images over. It's taken a few days, but they're now all indexed and browsable by date, place and even face. It'll even index the ARW images (albeit without the processing the PJGs benefit from). It's so liberating to have easy access to all these old memories. I always assumed a NAS would be a bit too much like hard work, but the UI and inbuilt apps are really really good with Synology and very easy to use. It's not a replacement for backups, but a wonderful compliment. Next step is to run previous year CaptureOne libraries off referenced images on the NAS, but that can wait for another day, for now though, I can't recommend this enough.