Understanding NAS Storage for Photographers (Part 1) 

Chriiiiiiiisssss! Where's part 2!!??! I see how you roll, give us a taste, and get us hooked, huh!? In all seriousness, thanks for all your hard work; the presentation is entertaining and the info is priceless. Can't wait to see the remaining videos.

Oh man! I've struggled to understand NAS for years and in just 12 minutes I now get it! Chris, you've got the gift of imparting knowledge in the most entertaining and easy to understand way. Thank you!

My current configuration is: a Synology DS1815 + (8 bays) in RAID 5 (SHR) for a useful volume of + - 15 TB. My backup NAS is a Synology DS418 (4 bays) in RAID 5 (SHR) for a useful volume of + - 15 TB. DSM does automatic backup every day no longer seeing arrays of disks attached to your computer brings incredible convenience and security.

When RAID was first devised at UC Berkeley, it stood for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Back then, it was an alternative to using a single large disk in a mainframe computer, comprised of the new, cheap personal computer hard disks.

Unbelievable , I just starting browsing articles this morning to try to get my head around NAS & RAID. I badly need to get my storage in order ... right now it's all on my laptop which is pretty much maxed out. And irrespective of space I'm fully aware that storing my files that way is a ticking time bomb! Really looking forward to the rest of the series, as always you are an absolute gem!

This is superb!! Already loving this series and it's just Episode 1 lol!

Love your energy, timestamps, and breaking everything down simply!

Can't wait for the rest of this series and what is to come on this channel! Fun, easy to understand, educational...typical of pal2tech. Thanks Chris!

I want to have this for a long time. but can't find a budget to buy one including the drives. This is really good to have.

Love and need this! I can’t wait for the next video in the series. Thank you for the amazing content, I’ve learned so much from you!

Chris, you've given me the push and confidence I need to take the plunge. In addition to the redundancy and ease of expansion, I love the idea of being able to access my photos from anywhere. Thank you!!

Finally, a video about data storage that’s much easier to understand. Thank you so much for making these videos.

This is what you call great content. I really enjoy your videos and looking forward to this series. Thank you All the best from Reykjavik

I have been waiting for you to cover NAS and/or external storage and here it is!

Great awesome intro to NAS Synology system! Will watch out for the rest :)

Great introduction to the NAS. Look forward to see the subsequent presentations.

Great! Thanks for bringing this important subject up. Will be looking into NAS storage next, so this is timely.

To tell you the truth, I always wanted to mount suck a backup system but I never found a place where I could get a good explanation of how it works. Your video did the trick and I am eternally grateful. will wait for the next episode, RAID. Thanks a million, :-)

Another great lesson from the legend. Thanks for sharing Chris. 👍🏽

Chris, this is great! I've been toying with the option of expanding to a NAS system... you may have given me the nudge that I needed.... look forward to the series

Thanks Chris. I have a bunch of external hard drives and have been looking at a better way. Excited to follow along in this journey.

Thanks very much for this - excellent video. Looking into NAS options now

Chris, it is as though you are a mind reader. I currently have a number of external drives for my storage and one of them is showing signs of age (similar to the operator). I have heard about NAS and RAID systems but frankly the tech speak around them has resulted in diverting my attention. This series is most timely and I thank you for breaking it all down to plain speak.

I love this channel. You are so full of energy with all your great content.

Love your work Pal2tech! Thank you!

The video I needed... have been trying to make sense of this all as someone new getting into photography. Thank you!

i have watched u since 2019 and realy love ur teaching style.

Great topic man. As a software architect this is an occasional intervention topic with family members. Too often someone whips out a laptop with their entire life on it. *Shudder*

Been looking forward to this for so long

Thank you! I was just diving into this topic.... Hope next video comes soon 😉

Thanks, Chris. I have been looking into getting a NAS and looking forward to the next video so I can get better ready to make the switch away from external drives.

Super video Chris. Looking forward to the rest of this series. I'm running a Synology DS216+ and looking to upgrade to something bigger and faster.

Okay Chris, this is so good! Over the last year I set up a NAS for exactly the reasons you listed and use it primary for photography and video. I'm really looking forward to the "next in series installments" of this tutorial and discussion. Thanks for starting this up. Most of the online videos are very focused on the computer end of stuff that suddenly we're off in mumbo-jumbo land terminology, I find them off putting. And while everybody is very well intentioned, helpful and nice, the terminology is daunting for something I'm not really going to using very much beyond the initial set up of the NAS. So I'm looking forward to your take. Thanks!

Great topic. I look forward to seeing where you go with these videos. I have been using the Synology NAS products for almost 10 years. They offer a great system for the less technical person. However, there are some items that having a technical background will be an advantage.

Great vids. Thanks 😊

I was afraid to shoot a video with 4K 60fps because it will filled up my storage quickly. But the way you explain reaaaaaalllyy easy to understand and now I will setup my own nas asap. Right now I rely on google photos to store every photo and video.

Can’t wait to work through this. I know you will do it justice!

Thank you very much, greate video :D

How this video does not have more views....so clear on concise. Thanks

I’m greatly looking forward to your next video. I need to sort out my storage. Current solution seems to have broken!

Thank you for explaining in an easily-understood manner! I’ve always wondered how NAS works, and I’m looking forward to the next video in the series. I’m tired of buying external hard drives🙆🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️

Thank you very much Chris!! it was indeed helpful and entertaining :)

Timely video for me too. Getting a new computer tomorrow and am considering my external storage options. Despite the great advice I will likely stick with a regular external hdd with a second as back up. But this video is food for thought and I will be looking into nas/raid tonight. Thanks and continue with your great and entertaining content!

Thanks so much for this! Please, keep going and learn us!!!!! I bought a NAS a month ago, but have been paralyzed with getting started.

Great video and for me greatly needed. I have just run out of space on my first external SSD and am starting to think of long term data management so I'm excited to see your full series. (In the mean time though I'm getting a second SSD 😅)

I look forward to subsequent videos on this subject!

Really happy to see that one of the best Fujifilm RU-vidrs is using the best NAS ;) You are making boring thing’s interesting:) btw. Remember about NAS use for TimeMachine ;)

Great content. 👍

Well done on this video. Was hard to understand. Not anymore! Thanks!

Well, I'm sold

You can also build your own home server and use DAS RAID enclosures for much less than what a NAS costs. I'm currently using my old 15" MBP that was just sitting in my drawer, as a home server, sitting in my garage, with 2 OWC RAID enclosures attached via Thunderbolt. The main RAID is the OWC Thunderbay 4 Mini that holds 4 x 2TB 2.5" SSDs in RAID 0. The. other one holds 4 x 4TB 3.5" HDDs in RAID 0. BackBlaze for cloud storage. I bought the OWC RAID enclosures used for about $100 each. If I didn't have an extra MBP laying around, I could get. a used Mac Mini for less than $100 that could be used as a server. Being a Mac, I can stream movies to any of my Apple devices at home without having to pay for Plex or other streaming apps.

I'm so glad you are doing this. It comes at a time where I have run out of ports to connect my 5 externals and while I do not need access to all of them simultaneously, when trying to use them all at the same time, my 2015 i5 Intel laptop just gets super bogged down in the explorer. While I did my own upgrade to run my laptop on higher-capacity processing and graphics rams and an internal SSD for faster boot times, and while she still manages to handle 4k proxies in premiere quite well, I have done data wrangling on sets where the amount of time it takes a MAC laptop to copy files is astoundingly shorter than on my old laptop. Even on non M1 Macs. Anyway, I doubt I can ever afford an apple product or even a new windows laptop with my handful of gigs every quarter, but it would be great to see videos on affordable used/new options for laptops.

Very good and informative video. Proper Data storage is certainly crucial today, especially if you are a creator or deal with tons of data. looks like you are the king of storage in general; looks like you have one of those giant plastic buckets for each category of accessories, tech... that you own. Every time you pull out one of them, I always go "uh oh....I bet ya we're about to see a ton of (whatever the topic is) in that giant bucket.." 🤣😂. Solid video Chris! Thanks for sharing!

Hahah I’d love to see those 1980s photos; love the 80s vibe. Thank you for this vid! SUPER IMPORTANT 👏🏽😊👍🏽

Thanks!

Thank you so much! I currently have a 6 bay (8T). I need help setting it up....

Awesome.

for your point about internal storage : most "mid-range" laptops or desktops these days have at least 2 hard drives. My laptop for example (which is in no way high end, I bought it for 700€ early 2020, has an i5 and a GTX 1650) already has a 250GB SSD and a 1TB HDD. If I want to replace that hard drive with a 4TB one, I can do so by removing 8 screws. The OS is on the SSD, so no biggie. same thing with desktops : my desktop is in a fairly compact case, but I have a 250GB SSd for my OS? a 1TB SSD for storage of video files used for editing, and a 3TB hard drive. And I still have a free 3.5" bay so I could add another one if I wanted. If you use a bigger case you could have several tens of TBs without any problem. I'm not even mentionning PCIe NVMe expansion cards that can hold like 4 PCIe 4.0 SSDs. So, except if you use an ultrabook that has soddered storage, or a Mac, saving your data on your personal computer is still possible, and you're not screwed if you reach max capacity. I agree with you with dropping and stealing computers (even though drops have very littel effect on SSDs as long as they're not directly physically damaged. They're not like HDD that have lots of moving parts that can break with a drop) Also, though it is true that hard drive have a life expectancy, everything in electronics do : CPUs, GPUs, RAM ect. As long as current goes through a piece of silicon, it deteriorates and one day, it fails. Storage solutions tend to have shorter life expectancies than the other components, but generally the life expectancy is higher than the life expectancy of your platform. I've yet to see a harddrive fail on me, and I've been working with very old office hard drives that pre-dates SATA. I've yet to see NAND flash modules fail as well. However, to anyone reading this and thinking 'uh, no need for better storage then' keep in mind that electronics fail UNPREDICTIBLY. The silicon of the memory module could be of lesser quality than the other and it would fail quicker. A chip on the control board could go kaputt as well you'd never know when. If you have very important data : pictures of your wedding, of your former pet, of your children when they were young, I have one word for you : REDUNDANCY. A drive failing on you is not common but it CAN HAPPEN.

I had a NAS system before they were cool! LIke 20 years ago, and in 2015 I got a Cr1ptor ransomware on my whole system! I've never paid the ransomware and never have found a way to get my photos/files back either. So even though I now have a much more robust security system on my network, I don't think I can trust NAS's anymore. I use 4 external drives onto my pc. Slower and backwards I know, but I was emotionaly and psychologically marked for life by the Cr1ptor virus. LOL! Thanks for your video.

Crystal Clean Explanation, Waited For This Video To Build One 4bay Soon Question expecting In Future Video Maybe Part 3 1. Types of Raid like 3 or 5 Don't no What Does That 2. Also Install 10GB ethernet & How it Works,Heard About It To Edit 4k Videos Faster 3. Back Blaze Service Setup Guide & Ur Fav Nas Apps That Use For a Purpose .

Wonderful video/video series! Best available for photographers or creative pros who have very little NAS and/or tech knowledge. But is the "Part 2" video posted?

Oh Chris. I have been thinking a lot about storage recently. After your video I went on Amazon to check out NAS systems.... I am now confused... I will wait for your next video, this stuff is not self explaining....

Synology best there is. And capable of running pi-hole dns in a docker container to get rid of trackers en advertising!

Just don’t mistake thinking RAID is, in any form, replacement for backup. The Redundancy will mostly give you uptime, but there are many types of failures that will cause complete data loss. Firmware bugs, accidental deletes, theft, flood, electrical surges, multi-disk failures are just a few. Interestingly, restoring a RAID array after failure puts a lot of stress on the disks compared to normal daily use, and if they’re old, that may be enough to push the non-failed drives over the edge. You *must* have tiered backups onto separate storage systems, and ideally a complete cloud backup as well.

Danke!

Hey thanks for this awesome video where is the backup video and the next videos to this series?

Thank you so much for this series. Will you be talking about 10gbe networking at all? I have a 10gbe network in my office and would love to take advantage of it and allow all the computers on our network fast access to our files (mostly video).

Hi :) I hope that you will present your workflow , your backup strategy and also if you use a cloud storage, your whole setup ;) Synology shr/shr2, hyperbackup , Synology snapshot , how do you set your setup , are you using external drives to backup your nas etc :) You can have a 30 parts serie and not even explaining everything since it’s a super important topic. Looking forward on your serie, it’s the first time that I see something owning that much nas in his home/studio. How many TB do you have right now ? Are you using many UPS to protect yours NAS ? How many TB do you backup to Backblaze B2 ? It must cost you an arm and a leg each month ? I know I asked a lot of stuff , but it’s the first time that I found someone who is starting at the beginning of the nas journey :)

thanks for this video! really appreciated! when is the second video coming? :)

Can you set up the NAS with a two HDD 1 for working and 1 for redundancy and a third one that can be swapped out on occasion to allow one off site, and regularly change out the two redundancy drives?

I would like to know the best practices for workflow. For example: do you work directly opening files from you NAS or is too slow?

Great video! I'm interested in Synology 920+ but I have a question for you.... Now I have different 4bay RAID5 Units ( usb3 connected ) in my studio for all my videos and Photoshoot. I use also Onedrive and Dropbox to take a copy of last year works that I can use when I work outside studio. My internet connection is FTTC 100Mbyte. If I use a DS920+/DS420+ as a private cloud I will have similar performance compared to OneDrive or DropBox?

So Nas is basically for archiving and data safety what you suggest about current jobs backups and safety while you editing those for about a month from shoot to final delivery time. Does Mac time machine is winner in that and working on external SSD and having back up with time machine hdd.

Ppl say ironwolf disks have problems with noise and bugs on write cache. What do you think about that?

I yearly do make a copy of my keepers (raw and JPG) on Bleu-ray disk. That is much saver and also saving on energy then keeping them on a harddisk or service on the internet.

I was wondering when you’d get around to this! I am getting the 1621xs+ soon.

Would love to see an overview of your workflow for ingest, sort, store in NAS, cull. I copy to an external SSD which sorts using Hazel then automatically backs up to my Synology. But I’m treating my synology like a backblaze in my basement. Need to take it further. Great video!

Can these be used across a local network with no internet access? I’m able to set up a high speed local network, but in my area I have little to no internet access.

I recently bought a Synology DS223 with just one 4TB Ironwolf HDD. I did not bought a 4-bay, first because it’s a bit out of my budget, but also because I don’t have that much data (I currently “only” have 400GB of photos. The thing is I’m not saving my data with redundancy. So, I probably should buy a second HDD. My question is: as one of the disks storage will basically be lost, is it possible to add for example an 8TB (with the exact same characteristics except the capacity), or should I buy a second 4TB model to be the exact same as the first one? Note that that it is for home use only, and the only thing I might share would be photos with family. Thanks for your help.

You mentioned that you were going to make a video going through the whole setup with all the settings and such. Is that up yet?

Will you be done with this series before Black Friday? :-D Would be great to be able to save some money... And keep going like this! I love your videos and the effort you put into them!

Hi Chris. Thank u. I have the 4 bay But I really think I’m not using it to its fullest capability. Can you show us the next episode how to get into the NAS using your computer or a phone? Thank you!

I’ve been waiting for your suggestion on the best drives to get for storage. Are you still working on that?

Will you cover managing the actual photo files on a NAS in the next video? I have a Synology NAS, and I'm not sure I'm doing things right, but it seems to be working out OK so far. I move my photos directly onto the NAS straight from the camera and then import them to Lightroom or Capture One off the NAS. I think it's a little slower than if I did it from my PC hard drive, but it means I can keep the catalog consistent. I'm new to both photography and NASes, though.

I find this video very interesting and would like you to to address some other topics that I am struggling with. I am currently using Apple products including Photos and iCloud but find I can not easily share photos between mine and my wife's iPhone. I thought the NAS system would help solve this problem along with others. I'm not in love with Photos but it works well with the Apple products. Phots will not run on a NAS unit. I currently use ON1 Photo Raw for my Fuji raw files and export a JPEG to Photos. I do not have to import files into ON1 thus the ON1 browser works with the Finder file structure. ON1 has a mobile app, but I don't know much about it yet. I would like to know how you integrate photos from two iPhones, Camera photos, photo editing, across multiple devices. Note that I set up a RAID unit within a tower PC years ago and had a single power failure which wiped out the RAID unit. How do the new NAS units protect against this?

This is so helpful! Did you end up making a part 2?

Yes, but how much? Do i need a subscription to operate the synology nas?

Years ago (firewire 1 days) I had a Drobo. It was slow but supposedly kept my files safe. Well, along came an Apple update and somehow it caused the Drobo directory to be completly erased. The files were there but could not be accessed. It only erased the directory but without the directory, files could not be restored. I used several recovery products and eventually got some of my jpegs back. No Raw file was ever recovered. After that happened I have two identical drives and have Carbon Copy clone each drive every day. I also back up my drives to the cloud for offsite storage. After the issue with Drobo I would never trust all my files on one device even if its a raid redundant device which Drobo was.

Small correction. Most computer manufacturers (which are not apple) make it really easy for you to upgrade your hard drive. You can use a cheap usb external hard drive enclosure and clone your existing hard drive meaning no need to reinstall your OS or configure anything.

Hey Chris, really great video. Could you address storing data on a NAS when you use multiple operating system - both Mac and PC? Thank you in advance.

Chris, I know you are are taking a well deserved break at the moment. Hope you see this. I've been a Synology DSM user for a while & really stand by the product. Was wondering if you use (or have used) the bundled photo content management apps (Photo Station or the newer Synology Photos)? I just upgraded my DSM OS to 7.1 & thus had to upgrade to Synology Photos. Short answer very happy with the upgrade. Would love your thoughts & perspective on all things NAS. Hope you are having a well deserved break. All the best.

Will there be a part 2?

It's unfortunate that the DX-517 is either backordered (NewEgg, B&H) or available for more than the cost of a NAS unit with more bays. I'm running out of space on my DS1918+, and the longer I wait for my backorder, the more my eyes stray.

I'm using NAS since years. I hope you will also get some infos how to secure the datas against malware encryption. I'm heaving all my photos on my Computer synchronized to the cloud and to my NAS. On NAS I have an external SSD connected which automatically get attached every Sunday at 1 o clock am and a backup is running. After the backup the SSD is automatically detached. The SSD is monthly exchanged with another one in my bank tresor.

Desperate for part II!!!!

Do you know about Jottacloud?

Just put everything on dropbox?

In my experience, drives are one of the easiest parts to swap or upgrade on a PC. Furthermore, you can set up RAID configurations locally on a PC (albeit usually not with the fastest performance.) This is to say, storing files locally on a PC isn't nearly the WORST way to store data, provided it's done correctly. That said, just get a NAS. It's an easier, more secure, and generally more convenient to do data storage. If you work with files in any way shape or form, (which everyone does nowadays) consider investing in a NAS that will suit your purposes. Or at the very least, add it to your "treat yo self" list.

I am also having a storage problem. But I guess the real problem is in the correct archiving. We need a systematic and correct archiving videos :)))

Your channel is the ONLY one that I can't watch at 1.25X 🤣🤣