This could not have been more timely. Literally have been doing all this research to try to decide what the heck to do and buy on Friday. 😂

@corysilkenphotography308

Жыл бұрын

Same.

Interesting timing! I just bought a second ds1821 for my off-site hot backup haha. I would recommend using SHR and not RAID as it’s much more flexible for expanding down the road. Next step for you should be to get a 10Gbe network setup going so you can edit directly off the NAS :)

This is so important. Really interested to see your organizational methodology concerning digital vs film with projects and themes. All the while optimizing external access. Also speaking of software. Lightroom, capture one, and open source/ Linux versions. I eventually arrived at using capture one, with files on the NAS and library locally or on a ssd external. Although 4tb seemed to be the limit before I experienced extreme slowness. I have had to upgrade to a very fast router, upgraded the ram on my synology but very happy with the apple like interface and lots of security features. Along with using Amazon glacier to get a backup on the east coast. The pain of setting this all up really encouraged me to go to film. Excited to see another perspective on this setup. Not a lot of coverage concerning using these and storage concerns for people how have been taking pictures for ever.

Hey Benj, super appreciate this video man, your stuff is so practically helpful as always. Perfectly timed with black Friday, but also with my business growing and having to get serious about my data setup. Been thinking about this exact scenario. Thanks again!

This so clear and helpful. Thank you for sharing and helping me finally be decisive about how to create a strong archive/backup system. Immediately followed the link and purchased the Synology 40TB.

Excellent video - thanks! Like you, I use to manually b/u my photos/videos to a series of external 4TB drives. Got a 4-bay Synology last year; populated it with four 6TB drives, and set up the raid so I now have 12TB of actual storage. Funny thing is, I still do another set of B/U to those external 4TB drives. I should be able to stop doing that, soon - I just needed to better-understand NAS, in general. Regarding the small SSD's, I too have one (SanDisk 2TB SSD). I think all photograhers still need these. They are exceptionally fast. When I'm on the road, I can now get 2 quick backups of my memory cards, while at the hotel after a shoot -- one, from the SD card to the laptop; and then another from the laptop to the SanDisk SSD. So when I return to studio I already have 3 copies (counting the actual memory card). Traveling w/the SanDisk portable SSD makes my work easier. I use to take the larger external drives, just to get my work backed up each day. The smaller footprint of the SSD, coupled with the speed is a game-changer. I wouldn't recommend using the small/portable SSDs as a main storage option. They'll get too hot. But when mobile, they can be a great time-saver to your backup process when away from the studio. With that, I believe we need a hybrid approach. Definitely having a NAS system for all the formal B/U is a must. But, having one of the portable SSDs, and maybe even one of the larger external's can round out the storage challenges most of us face. Cheers!

Cannot wait for your video on how you setup your backup system

Thanks. This is great and really helpful. Either in the comments or a follow up video, I'd love more information about how you connect all of this to your home WiFi. How that all works, how everything is connected, what system you use and what speeds you get. And then how that works for editing in lightroom or other software when you're not directly plugged in. Thanks again!

I have two 4tb San Disk Extreme SSDs. Expensive AF, but for me its worth it. I use one as a temporary backup, and one as a working drive. Then once a project is finished I will archive it onto two separate lacie rugged drives. I've been wanting to get a NAS system of some kind to replace at least one of the lacies in this workflow.

@AllAccessConstruction

Жыл бұрын

Grab that 4tb for 299 black Friday.. 👍🏾👍🏾 Been waiting all year

I'm still on the lacie drives as yearly backups lol about to jump on these sometime soon!

Great video for working professionals (and photo/video hobbyists) I had almost an identical workflow journey of having multiple hard drives, labeled them and would store them away, hoping they’d start up if needed 😂 You’ll probably go into more detail in your next video on workflow but a key philosophy for data backup is 3-2-1. 3 copies of data, 2 on-site and 1 off-site(cloud) Synology offers a great interface to integrate with almost all of the cloud services to offer that essential off-site back up for data.

Just bagged the LACIE Rugged Mini 5TB in a Black Friday deal. Nice bit of kit. The raid system is appealing, but for me currently a long way off, need a new Mac first!

I've wanted a setup like this for a while but all of the more involved tech specs and setup is like gibberish to me, I never know what the right options are. Especially when the systems are a larger amount of money. Lookng forward to seeing your workflow video!

Thank you Benj. I have bought one Synology NAS. However I do realize I have trouble setting it up to fully utilize it. I wanted to be able to access it remotely even if I am not home and also would like to share the storage with my family like a cloud storage where everyone else can also enjoy the setup. For a whole year, I am still not able to do that 😢😢

Looking forward to the workflow / backup video

I bought a Synology NAS this summer and it has been fantastic. I moved all my photos and backups to the device. It is awesome that I am able to also access my photos from anywhere and also create a private chat group for my whole family. I would highly recommend investing in a unit.

I think a video on your backup system and file retrieval would be really helpful! 🤩

synology user here too. would love to see your workflow. - are you using the synology just for archiving, or are you working directly off of it? - how are you managing your images? lightroom? one big catalog? or catalog per assignment/shoot?

The bottleneck is moving files from flash medium (like SD cards) to network drives, not the network drives themselves. And keeping those drives organized. I use an old HP workstation that supports direct connection to 10 SATA drives on the MB (plus I can add several PCIE expansion cards to add support for an additional 24 to 36 drives)... And it cost me about 1/4 the price of a NAS chassis without hard drives.

Just want to add that SSDs are not designed to work 24/7 in a raid array. I know this because I had 3 brand new SSDs running in RAID 5 for about a year and they eventually failed. I would recommend HDDs in the NAS and just use SSDs for cacheing within the NAS (or editing on the go). Just make sure you have backups!

@danajorgensen1358

Жыл бұрын

SSD are bad for any sort of array storage. The limited write cycles quickly lead to drive failure because the way the array structure forces the drives to "start from zero", unless you're scanning/repairing them whenever there is downtime.

This system is super cool is there a way I can get in touch with to ask you to help set one up

Hey Benj..! can you do a video of you taking pictures with the Sony ZV-1. I would love to see what kind of images you would get. Thanks

From a 12 year data recovery veteran this is pretty good advice. Couple things … 1. Don’t over complicate the raid setup. Raid 5 is best. Redundancy is key , and keep it visible so you can see any failed bay lights. Not in a cupboard where it cannot be seen or overheat. 2. Never use raid 0 , it’s insane unless it’s backed up (never is) 3. Those orange LaCie drive use seagate rosewood drives and are ticking time bombs. They look cool but are complete trash.

@remotesupport

Жыл бұрын

Also.. when picking a raid setup stick to the most boring default options. (Raid5) stay away from hybrid/nested/Drobo arrays as in the event of a failure these configs require the most work and can be very expensive to rebuild. (The most boring / standard ones can be rebuilt using commercially available software). Complete Raid units can fail so my advice would be to invest in one of the high capacity WD drives Amazon has and do incremental backups to a 16-20TB elements drive. P.s never leave an external hard drive standing up. Lay it on its side with some bluetac or sticky tape to hold it to a surface. Pets,cleaners,and random tugs can have them fly off a shelf or desk.

Like the video! I’m wondering how you manage the combination between having an SSD for ongoing work and a NAS for archival purposes. Also, how does managing and backing up your Lightroom catalog fit into this? Lastly, since you mentioned getting a second NAS setup to have redundancy in a different location, have you considered cloud backup, or is is this not cost effective?

@benjhaisch

Жыл бұрын

Cloud Backup is an option for sure, but it's prohibitively expensive if you're backing up 40TB+ like me... haha

Just a heads up, the top links don’t seem to be working.

Yooo this is just what I need lol I'm surrounded by these little SSD drives and I know it's a really suboptimal solution. Thanks for this vid gonna check out the Synology.

I have a question. How long this synology with these drives will last? Do you have to change the disks periodically (let's say put new disks every 2-3 years)?

Yup. For sure. Making my NAS has changed everything for me.

So normally after the wedding, you will copy the raw files to the NAS over the 10gbe network. How slow is it compared to copying the raw file via thunderbolt? I can't get my head around this issue, it seems like a bottle neck there and slows down my workflow.

All this seems great BUUUUUUT.... How easy is it to implement, manage etc? Will do what it takes in 2023 to get rid of my original (brace for it) DROBO - circa 2008. That Dorbo was slow then and I cannot tell you how slllooooooow it is now.

I have a synology 2. I agree with you, when I got it I felt grown up. I was wondering do you back that up with cloud storage (Dropbox or back blaze)? Also, do you think it still makes sense to still buy several Sandisk SSDs to have another back up in case the system fails? Or do you think cloud storage and synology would be the only way to go for complete redundancy?

@Dahrenhorst

Жыл бұрын

You need one back up, regardless on what tech it is based, outside of your home. A friend of mine makes copies of his new files once a month on a HDD and brings the drive to me. After one year, he copies all 12 monthly drives on one really big HDD and uses the old drives for the monthly back ups over the coming year. He is thinking of switching to a cloud service, but right now, it's still much to expensive for the amount of data he has.

You legend I need to build a nas now

Somewhat agree. Most PC's and Macs are shipping with small SSD's. The push is to use external drives. I have a Synology 920s. Editing via NAS is painfully slow. You still need a good SSD as an external working drive. Personally, I use M.2 drives in enclosures. Long term storage, yes, a synology is great. Backup, again, Synology....working drives, you need to keep purchasing SSD's.

Can you access Lightroom or photoshop from the NAS

@benjhaisch

Жыл бұрын

You can't store your working catalog for lightroom on the NAS and use it directly form there, no. But I can access and edit in photoshop from there. I can also store the RAW files on it and edit them in LR, just can't open the catalog from it.

I’ve got a 4 bay Synology NAS supported by a UPS in case power goes down while writing data to it. The UPS also suppers my WiFi router and fibre broadband. It’s given me peace of mind and organisation benefits. My photo raw file Lightroom library go back to 2006 and like Ben I had these on multiple external drives and backed up my even more external drives. What a mess of disks over the years even with all carefully labelled. I was also using premium Dropbox paid service for storing family files, tax documents, work files etc which is great because you can easily save stuff to the Dropbox cloud anywhere if your phone. Well you can do the same with Synology NAS apps on your phone or iPad. Just save to your home NAS from anywhere in the world. I was able to ditch the expensive Dropbox service and use my NAS instead - but for offsite backup you need either another NAS at another location or a cloud backup for your NAS. These are generally not expensive The other thing is that when we built our home years ago we had the entire house ethernet LAN cabled. Usually Wi-Fi is just fine for most homes and that’s all we use most of the time --- but if you are transferring gigabytes of raw files you want a cable so I can do the intensive large file work off my NAS from pretty much anywhere in my house. That alternative to network cable is power line adapters but last time I checked these were slower (but faster than Wi-Fi over a distance.

The key here is moving from a Drobo 5C to a synology raid. That’s my challenge. Drobo announced they will not support Ventura.

Great vid.

Funny I just loaded a few drives in my basket this morning.

I’ve bought synology nas this year but i did not used it on its full potential atm, its not autosyncing data now because i did not have time during wedding season, im waiting for your movie how you manage and set up whole process ;) now i postprocess on extreme ssd and make a copy manually on the nas, option in Lightroom that says ‚make a second copy on the location xxx’ does not work for me atm

@tazsmith

Жыл бұрын

Nas suck. I have wasted way to much money. People who say they like them are just looking for that affiliate money

@richardpen1799

Жыл бұрын

@@tazsmith I like them and get zero money for saying so 🤷‍♀️

@tazsmith

Жыл бұрын

@@richardpen1799 you got me

It’s always important to say: RAID is for maintaining uninterrupted access to the data in case of disk failure (or having faster access), NOT for preventing data loss. Entire RAIDs can fail or be corrupted.

Ive been using a synlogy NAS for over a year now well worth the money

Now that Seagate makes very affordable 18 TB drives. I don’t quite see the need for a big RAID. I don’t know, just me.

lol my nas is full. Now I need a bigger one

Lol a retirement account, but yea synology is great. Another cool thing you can do is back it up to the cloud as well in case your shed burns down or if there's a flood. Synology software is good for that, you can backup to something like AWS Glacier Deep Archive that costs almost nothing.

From a pure tech point of view, if you want to store large amounts of data like a personal cloud then you want HDDs and not SSD because of cell degradation in SSDs. But ngl this seems like complete overkill for the average Joe, you could just add a 4TB HDD into your PC and happy days

@benjhaisch

Жыл бұрын

Sure, but I don't have a PC and I need 40TB+ ;)

A cloud service is by far better

From the thumbnail I thought it was a xylophone

If you do not need “networking capabilities” aka connecting more than one computer at a time you do not need a NAS. Buy a DAS instead. NAS have so many issues from no one talks about. 1st off you need to buy two of them or your data is not safe or you will still be paying for a online service for backup. 2nd transfer speeds are incredibly slow if you do not buy or upgrade to 10gbe connections. (Just because you 1gb Wi-Fi doesn’t mean you will have those speeds from your nas. Over network you will get between 30mbs-70mbs reliably. 3rd I had to hire a IT consultant to actually help me set this thing up because it is far from straightforward and nobody actually shows you how big of a pain it is to hard line in at decent speeds without disconnecting. 4th most 10gbe converters are still sold out because of Covid so you will have to over pay for a 10gbe to thunder bolt if you want good transfer speeds. 5th most good mesh routers systems suck theses days for using fast Ethernet connections to other devices so be prepared to pay over 700$ for a router that will not make you life a total suck. A DAS on the other hand you will have non of these issues. You just lose the ability to have multiple computers connected and internet access. I would say a cloud service will provide you actual usable speed and unlimited storage at a significantly lower price. And if you just need photo back up possibly even “free” if you have a prime account they have unlimited full rez image backup

@tazsmith

Жыл бұрын

Also if you do not know some of the technical terms I used in this forget using a NAS.

@benjhaisch

Жыл бұрын

Sure, a lot of valid points here. 1. This is the same for a DAS as well or any real solution. 2. I'm getting a pretty darn consistent 100MB/s write/read on my older DS918+, but yes, you're going to get slower speeds than a DAS for sure. 3. I didn't have any issues, but I know a friend of mine who isn't as tech-forward who needed help. 4. Yes, 10GbE is prohibitively expensive for sure. 5. I have a pretty basic router without issue. All of that to say, good info. I prefer a NAS for the reasons I mentioned, but a DAS is a totally valid setup as well. It's just going to be far easier for me to have physical backups in two physical locations now with two NAS setups. But yeah, as long as you have a responsible backup/failsafe setup, that's all that matters.

@benjhaisch

Жыл бұрын

ah and lastly using Amazon Prime's full res backup goes against their TOS for any professional/business use [unless they've update it recently]

@tazsmith

Жыл бұрын

@@benjhaisch impressive. I can't believe someone actually read that page... 🤣 your probably right. I don't use Amazon beach I use drive.

@tazsmith

Жыл бұрын

@@benjhaisch appreciate the response mate. Don't tell anyone but I actually have a NAS. I have two sometime 3 editors that need to access the same files within cable distance. after much trail and error and hiring a IT guy I have near 500mbs speeds over a 10gbe cable. I am just trying to share some counter points that no one told me because everyone talks so highly of them but they actually suck at most things people recommend them for. When most people should just be recommending a DAS or two large HDD drives.

FRACK SYNOLOGY. I needed another 12bay NAS, and their latest 12 bay NAS is "locked" to their branded drives. You can use other brands (Seagate, WD) - but you'll never know when they are failing. FRACK SYNOLOGY. Taking my $$$ elsewhere.