I am a complete noob to backups and NAS’, so pardon my newbie question
I want to run my own Dropbox/GDrive-like box, because I don’t want to pay these companies a subscription just to store my files, at a high price, with no privacy.
I have terabytes of photography, due to being a hobbyist street photographer where each photo is over 50 megapixels, so 100 MB+ per photo. I am quickly running out of space in my computer despite my terabyte SSDs. So I am trying to think of a more scaleable way to do this on my own.
I was thinking of getting a NAS from Synology or TerraMaster, and put 2x 20 TB HDD drives in there in RAID 1, because I am filling up my storage FAST. Or maybe I would get a 4 drive bay NAS so I can do RAID 10… I am not entirely sure – this sounds more expensive.
Some requirements:
- I want to be able to access my RAW photos from anywhere
- I want to be able to sync my Lightroom Catalog between my Mac (when I travel) and Windows (my primary PC)
- I want to make sure my photos are properly backed up, redundantly in case a drive fails
- Secure & private
- A bonus is performance, but with HDD drives, I know I won’t be getting the performance as if I have everything in a built-in NVME or SSD, which I have right now. However, I don’t mind having some files local to the NVME from recent shoots, and then moving stuff over for long term storage
I am a complete nub to this, so I have some questions:
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Is a NAS the best solution for this?
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Should I go for a 2x drive bay, or more?
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Is there perfomance degradations if I am at home where the NAS and desktop/laptop are in the same network?
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Are there any other questions I should be asking but haven’t asked?
it’ll get the job done. For a “nub” I’d recommend it
go with a 4 drive bay. Start with 2x in RAID 1 and if you need more space, go with 4x in RAID 6
depends on your network architecture and network utilization at the time
If it’s just idle, then no.