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.