NAS for photostorage, plus and minus

Well, I thought this would be a good idea. Allowing a central store for all the computers in the house. His laptop/netbook, her iMac and laptop. Provide a safe(ish) place to archive digital data. Let me clear down the laptop disk but still have access to all the images.

Now the reality is kicking in.

The NAS was pretty easy to set up. But I have reasonable tech skills.

Issues:
1. Speed. You can only populate my drive over the network connection and when you are loading 200GB data it takes time. It's faster using a wired connection than wireless. This speed problem will be an issue in getting the data off when I want to backup the backup so to speak. Doing it again I'd want a USB connection or gigabit ethernet.

2. Ensuring you have all your photos on there. Well I copied a few directories and then used sync toy. And I think I have everything from my master USB portable disk (and its back up HDD) and 2 laptop hard drives. Its a right pain making sure though, especially with the speed restriction.

3. Mobility, of course now when I leave the house with the laptop I don't take any of the images from the NAS drive. So I will have to put a process into place to keep and exported directory of my best images, a digital portfolio.

4. 2nd Disk. The NAS came with one disk. It has the feature if you add a second disk to mirror the contents(RAID). So if one disk fails the data is safe. Yes if the NAS circuits go as well as a disk there might be trouble. Anyway hopefully I'll just get a cheap 500GB disk from ebay for £25 used or £35 new. Bringing total cost to £160 ish. Plus point is its hot swappable.

Whether it is a good solution for me is still unclear. FYI

I've mucked around with this concept a bit, using an Apple Airport Extreme router which allows you use external USB hard disks as NAS drives.

One useful tidbit I discovered was that the old iView Media Pro photo catalog software (now gobbled up by Microsoft I believe) works well for this, because it will catalog the photos on the NAS, but keep the thumbnails in a local folder, so browsing them is quick and responsive, and only when you double click the image does it access the NAS. At one point I had it set up cataloging about 100GB of (stock) photos, and the local thumbnail folder on my laptop was about 500MB. Best of both worlds

Cheers Tim,

on the mac...
Aperture does not play well with nas drives at all.
you will be in a world of hurt if two users on a network start accessing the same drives or files simultaniously...

but there IS something...

if you were to set up an automator workflow to dupe your originals to the nas drive on import you'd have a decent back-up...

or like me, you can import your work into aperture, work on a project, update your aperture vault all on regular drives, then back up your library on the nas once a month...

I use nas drives as back-ups of my movie files and keep my itunes library on one.

Don,

Not worried.

I'm the photo editor so locked files shouldn't be a problem.

the NAS can provide a destination for Time Machine soooooo I guess if I work on the iMac I'm sorted (once configured). Exporting final images to the NAS, if I have the original and final then no problem.

Any images will be loaded to the NAS as a matter of course and accessed from there. Backup sync'd from the NAS to portable HDD once in a while.

Thanks

Which NAS solution did you go for?

I have one of the older Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ units with 3 x 1Tb HDD's in XRAID (1.7Tb usable). I have created two shares which backup to 2 separate 1Tb HDD's connected to the rear USB ports. Backup is automatic and I have it backing up every 4 hours. Once every 4 weeks, it wipes the backup drives and starts again.

As for network, the ReadyNAS has 1 x 1Gb connection to a Netgear DGN3500 router, which in turn provides 4 x 300Mb/s wireless connections and 4 x 1Gb wired connections. I have wireless repeaters serving the remote parts of my house. By remote parts, I don't mean that my house is enormous, but there is a lot of brick, steel, and concrete for the signal to propagate through.

The ReadyNAS also has a Firefly option, which is an iTunes server. That doesn't work too well with huge numbers of music files though.

Peter, readyNAS DUO, it was NAS, and RAID (hot swapable, I hate waiting while RAIDs resync)and CHEAP, £135, and new!

Its just a very simple home setup, hopefully I can clear down my laptop and I will not have to upgrade for another year.

Also environmentally it draws 35W max and you can program it to switch off at specific times.

There's some bundled software NTI Shadow which seems to do what I want. Monitor a directory and back up files to the NAS.

You sound very well appointed.

The ReadyNAS Duo is ideal for the home and I'd certainly recommend that you add the 2nd drive to give you RAID 1 security for the data it holds. I would not advise buying from eBay. Instead, buy the drive from a reputable source, and buy new, not refurbished (some call it re-manufactured).

One of my 1Tb Seagate drives died in mine and it was replaced under warranty by Seagate with a re-manufactured one. It lasted less than a year. It was again replaced under warranty, this time with a new one.

Slightly OT: For my needs, storing image files on a NAS box works well. Lightroom however, will not save it's catalog file to anything other than a local drive. To ensure I don't lose it, the catalog is backed up to my NAS box every time I exit Lightroom.

I've got a ready NAS NV+ with 4 1.5TB drives in XRaid. Links to main PC via Gig ethernet, works absolutely fine.
If any individual disc goes you lose nothing and it emails you to tell you not happy so you can hot swap the faulty disc and resync. If the chassis goes you could be stuffed, so I secure the NAS photo backups to a 1TB external HDD.
If your NAS has access to a network router you can set it up so you can access the NAS from 'tinterweb, but I have not done this and I'd be careful about security!

Paul

Hint: BeyondCompare from Scooter Software is just about the best directory/file sync tool Just wish there was a Mac version as good (though GoodSync isn't that bad).
HTH!
Matt

FileSync is also very good.

Thanks folks.

yes I dislike refurb disks. I can get a new one for £32 the refurbs are no cheaper. If I could get a low use 2nd hand with known provenance cheap but its probably not worth the effort.

I think now its all about working out how to use this within a process.

Unison is easy to use, very fast, and cross-platform. Oh, and free (GPL).

And it syncs both ways, flagging any conflicts, so can be used to sync laptop to desktop, eg., even if both are updated between syncs.

Can you still read the HDD's SMART info when it's in a
NAS Box?

I keep adding NAS drives to my home network. I'm now up to 4.

I have one old Buffalo single drive NAS which has now been retired to become a FTP server for the IPcamera watching the wildlife in the back garden.

I have 2 Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duos both of which are running 500+500gB raid 1. One is used for general backup and the other as our photo vault. All the family photos get archived here and it means that they are available on the network to any of the computers, 3 PCs, a laptop and a Mac plus other display devices like an Apple TV. I have adopted a user/date/event hierarchical structure on this drive. I don't edit directly from this drive but copy on a PC or Mac and put it back, possibly under a later date, when finished.

I recently wanted a a new NAS drive, which we call the Media Vault, for backup & streaming of our music and videos. The Buffalos feel a bit dated so following some research I bought a Synology DS211j to which I have installed a pair of Hitachi 1gB drives again running raid 1. This device is a huge improvement over the Buffalos and comes with loads of tools.

My favourite tool is the USB dump. Plug a USB stick into the front and push a button, again on the front, to dump the contents into a unique folder in a predefined place and then automatically dismount the USB device. I found this works fine with SDHC cards from my camera using a little Sandisk USB adaptor and is a way of making a quick backup of a camera card.

The Synology has various monitoring tools including a syslog & SNMP but I just get it to email me if it thinks it has a problem and I can see it under my desk if it completely fails.

You can build a NAS using an old PC, do a search for FreeNAS, but I think modern dedicated NAS devices are now better at being power efficient and I would worry about using old drives. However FreeNAS can be a very low cost option if you have an old PC kicking about.


Glyn