[vector]

But I do backup my finished pics exported as JPEGS to my Google cloud drive so at least my important images are stored off-site.

Cool, backup to cloud services is a good option. It can be expensive if its a lot of data but if you are just protecting the final product that way it seems like a decent compromise to make. I think Backblaze has one of the most affordable cloud backup options and might be worth checking out. They also publish a lot of their hard drive reliability statistics so they are a good resource if you are looking to buy new drives and want to know what is actually reliable or not. Their whole service is built using commodity hardware but multiple copies. Amazon S3 can also be affordable but you will have to get a lot more technical to set things up there. If you subscribe to Flickr that is another option, you could sync the files there as a backup. With cloud that makes 3 copies which I feel like is the minimum to be considered safe. In your shoes I might also add 1 more drive for backups that only run periodically and are taken away and stored at another physical location.

[EssJayEff]

Peter Krogh’s The DAM Book 3.0 covers this topic quite well re pros and cons of NAS and other approaches.

The DAM Book 3.0 - The DAM Book

[gatorguy]

As I always like to point out. Imagine the following scenario:

You're having dinner at Aunt Edna in Daytona Beach. The neighbour's kid steals a fire truck and drives it home, misses his driveway and drives into your house, severing the gas lines and power supply. Your house and everything in it is now spread over two street blocks and lightly charred. Only a little toe is found of the neighbour's kid, still in his sneaker, roughly where your Living Room used to be. Your cat miraculously turns up two days later, asking for food.

Where's your data?

Great example Mark. At my business I also back up important files to our Google Cloud Drive enterprise account.

At home I have specific directories that get backed up to my personal Google Cloud Drive, but not complete backups of the entire system. It's mostly select photos, some reference files, artwork, documents, etc. Since you brought it up, and I have 2TB with only about 500GB currently used, there really isn't any reason not to do so. It's all in the background and painless.

Thanks!

[gatorguy]

Peter Krogh’s The DAM Book 3.0 covers this topic quite well re pros and cons of NAS and other approaches.

The DAM Book 3.0 - The DAM Book

Thanks for pointing me to that resource. I'll have a look at it today.

[gatorguy]

Having used a NAS as well as a RAID setup in the past, I have one question:
What are you backup strategy?

I meant to ask you earlier: You used to use a NAS but no longer do? Any particular reason?

[Digitalis]

One piece of info is that a NAS, even with redundancy, is not a backup

Though depending on the type of RAID used, it is better than nothing. And having multiple copies of the same files spanned across multiple drives ( and multiple devices) substantially increases their long term chances of being recovered in the event of a hardware failure.

Things only get worse if on a wireless network too.

As a matter of security keeping a NAS off wireless networks is very important.

[Grokh]

I am using a home NAS Sinology 420+ with four WD Red drives of 10 TB each. They are combined in RAID 5, which provides data safety in the event of failure of one of the disks (any). Based on my many years of experience as a system administrator, I believe that RAID 5 is the minimum possible configuration that can somehow ensure the safety of critical files. It provides so-called "redundant storage", as a result, I cannot use all 40 TB for storing data, but only 30. (Of course, RAID 6 is even better - it saves data when two disks fail simultaneously, but this the solution is noticeably slower, more expensive and less economical in terms of using disk space.) I believe that RAID 5 (it requires at least three disks) is sufficient for homework - of course, provided that you have a backup of the most important files on removable disks or in the network clouds. And, of course, you need an uninterruptible power supply - preferably one that "understands" your NAS.
A big plus of many modern NAS is the ability to relatively easily configure them so that you can access your photos from anywhere, as long as there is the Internet - from a hotel, from the airport, from a high-speed train, etc. It is very convenient for people who travel a lot.
Of course, for convenient work you need a high-speed network at home - 1 GB / s, wired or wireless.
Regarding cataloging when working with photos stored on the NAS. There is a small problem here: such a convenient program as LR, alas, does not support storing its catalog file on network drives. But in the case of using systems like Synology, this is not difficult to solve by means of the NAS themselves, which allows you to have remote access not only to the images themselves, but also to their catalog (if necessary). Also, this solution allows you to organize the synchronization of the catalog between two different machines.
This is to put it briefly.

[gatorguy]

I am using a home NAS Sinology 420+ with four WD Red drives of 10 TB each. They are combined in RAID 5, which provides data safety in the event of failure of one of the disks (any). Based on my many years of experience as a system administrator, I believe that RAID 5 is the minimum possible configuration that can somehow ensure the safety of critical files. It provides so-called "redundant storage", as a result, I cannot use all 40 TB for storing data, but only 30. (Of course, RAID 6 is even better - it saves data when two disks fail simultaneously, but this the solution is noticeably slower, more expensive and less economical in terms of using disk space.) I believe that RAID 5 (it requires at least three disks) is sufficient for homework - of course, provided that you have a backup of the most important files on removable disks or in the network clouds. And, of course, you need an uninterruptible power supply - preferably one that "understands" your NAS.
A big plus of many modern NAS is the ability to relatively easily configure them so that you can access your photos from anywhere, as long as there is the Internet - from a hotel, from the airport, from a high-speed train, etc. It is very convenient for people who travel a lot.
Of course, for convenient work you need a high-speed network at home - 1 GB / s, wired or wireless.
Regarding cataloging when working with photos stored on the NAS. There is a small problem here: such a convenient program as LR, alas, does not support storing its catalog file on network drives. But in the case of using systems like Synology, this is not difficult to solve by means of the NAS themselves, which allows you to have remote access not only to the images themselves, but also to their catalog (if necessary). Also, this solution allows you to organize the synchronization of the catalog between two different machines.
This is to put it briefly.

OK, so what do you mean by "easy to solve LR cataloging"? The catalog would stay on my desktop but I had planned for the photos to reside on the NAS. If that's going to be an issue what's the easy solution you mention? As it stands my images are strewn across several remote drives which I see as "network drives", ie G:, H: etc., but still available to the LR catalog. Do you mean something different when referring to a network drive and NAS?

[gatorguy]

Here's another resource that talks directly about what's led me to look into a NAS to begin with.
Lightroom Catalog a mess? How to Organize all your photos in Lightroom - PhotoshopCAFE

Edit; Oohh, oohh... Just found this Youtube video that addresses the other question about Lightroom, catalogs, and NAS.

You Tube

You Tube

[gatorguy]

OK, so I've added hardware to my Amazon cart.

- Synology 220+ (2-bay NAS)
- two Seagate Exos at 6GB each.
- One "repackaged" Synology memory stick from the Amazon Warehouse to add another 4GB, and yes they are very over-priced but necessary to keep under warranty. At least it's only about $50.

Does anyone see any red flags for this? The price seems pretty reasonable, roughly $700, and I won't be utilizing SHR. I'll backing up weekly to a 10GB HDD I already have.

[Grokh]

OK, so what do you mean by "easy to solve LR cataloging"? The catalog would stay on my desktop but I had planned for the photos to reside on the NAS. If that's going to be an issue what's the easy solution you mention? As it stands my images are strewn across several remote drives which I see as "network drives", ie G:, H: etc., but still available to the LR catalog. Do you mean something different when referring to a network drive and NAS?

I meant that placing the LR catalog file on the local disk of one of the machines is not always convenient. It is often highly desirable to have access to the SAME LR catalog file from DIFFERENT machines. Sometimes you may even need to access the catalog file over the Internet.
This is why it may be necessary to place on the NAS not only the photos themselves (which goes without saying), but also the Lightroom catalog file itself.

[Kunzite]

Having used a NAS as well as a RAID setup in the past, I have one question:
What are you backup strategy?

"What is a backup?" said my father, many years ago, while Norton Disk Doctor was crunching on a tired 386 PC...

[Grokh]

OK, so I've added hardware to my Amazon cart.

- Synology 220+ (2-bay NAS)
- two Seagate Exos at 6GB each.
- One "repackaged" Synology memory stick from the Amazon Warehouse to add another 4GB, and yes they are very over-priced but necessary to keep under warranty. At least it's only about $50.

Does anyone see any red flags for this?

It looks good, but!
Seagate Exos discs are very high class discs, but how exactly are you going to use them? You don't want SHR, but will you be doing mirroring (RAID 1) or striping (RAID 0)? Or will you use the disks as two separate volumes without merging them?
It seems to me (yes, I'm paranoid) that regular copying to a spare disk alone is not enough. In any case, I prefer a NAS configured in such a way as to have at least some ability to protect against possible data loss (in case of a disaster) by means of the NAS itself. Having paid a lot of money for Exos-type disks, I would prefer to think about increasing the reliability of the system as a whole: so that the entire software and hardware complex corresponds to the level of the disks themselves.
Many of our photos and personal files are priceless. In every sense of the word.

---------- Post added 14th Dec 2021 at 17:54 ----------

I think Backblaze has one of the most affordable cloud backup options and might be worth checking out.

Yes, it's a good service. I've been using it for over a year now, and if you have unlimited outbound traffic it seems like a smart move.

[Kunzite]

Never use RAID 0!

How much data are you going to store? With only 2 HDD slots, the only capacity upgrade would be replacing both your drives with larger ones (or an expansion unit)

Disk access won't be fast, with transfers at about 100MB/sec (over 1GbE). I'm not sure about any direct editing, even if it's photo...
There are NAS units offering 2.5GbE and even 10GbE, but the rest of your network has to support it, too. There are also NAS units allowing direct access through USB - yes, they have to explicitly allow for this. And they're more expensive.

I had a cheap QNAP TS-431p for a while, lesson learned - plan a bit for the future. Those "toys" can do a lot more than storing data, if they have the hardware resources... in my case, 1GB RAM being the limiting factor.

[Grokh]

Never use RAID 0!

How much data are you going to store? With only 2 HDD slots, the only capacity upgrade would be replacing both your drives with larger ones (or an expansion unit)

Disk access won't be fast, with transfers at about 100MB/sec (over 1GbE). I'm not sure about any direct editing, even if it's photo...
There are NAS units offering 2.5GbE and even 10GbE, but the rest of your network has to support it, too. There are also NAS units allowing direct access through USB - yes, they have to explicitly allow for this. And they're more expensive.

I had a cheap QNAP TS-431p for a while, lesson learned - plan a bit for the future. Those "toys" can do a lot more than storing data, if they have the hardware resources... in my case, 1GB RAM being the limiting factor.

I completely agree.
I’ll add on my own: acquiring a NAS is a serious investment. Therefore, you need to buy a device with a certain margin, so that its hardware and software capabilities slightly exceed your current needs (for example, today you do not need access to your files via the Internet, but tomorrow you may need it), and so that it (the device) would have expansion options (adding memory, new drives, pairing with another NAS device, etc.).
And more about RAID. I completely agree with the words of my colleague above, but I will just repeat: in my opinion, the minimum for a home is still RAID-5.