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Thinking of getting a NAS to store my RAW photos + back up my Lightroom catalog + access them anywhere -- some questions (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by WhosAfraidOf_138@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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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:

  1. Is a NAS the best solution for this?

  2. Should I go for a 2x drive bay, or more?

  3. Is there perfomance degradations if I am at home where the NAS and desktop/laptop are in the same network?

  4. Are there any other questions I should be asking but haven't asked?

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[–] Elegant_Collection_7@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You can store your work files on your PC and have them synced over the network. That way you still have your local NVME speed and you can have peace of mind knowing those files are in good hands (after a set time of course). Once you don't need to edit those files you can archive them by moving them to non-synced folder so they won't eat up the space.

With 1GbE in local network it still transfers way faster than over the Internet.

On a 4 disk RAID 5 setup you're getting about 3X speed of a mechanical drive which will be about 300-400MB/s which is almost on par with 2.5 inch SSDs. However there're 4 drives spinning at the same time and will consume about 100w of power so keep that in mind.

[–] WhosAfraidOf_138@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Can you expand a bit on what you mean by work files on the PC and have them synced over the network, workflow wise? Anything special I need to do with the NAS?

[–] Elegant_Collection_7@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I mean have your LightRoom library on PC and have it realtime sync to your NAS so you still enjoy the speed. If that's not what you want you want it on NAS you should consider 1 GBe is your bottleneck. You want opt for something faster.