When it comes to safely archiving our work, we have certainly seen a lot of changes over the past two decades. We have gone from storing our transparencies and negatives in cardboard boxes (and hoping we never had a flood or fire), through to burning our work onto DVDs only to hoard them in cupboards… and it was a very tedious day at the studio whenever we had to search through negatives or discs looking for one particular image.
Over the past few years though, storage has become a lot easier and while some of us might still be using external hard drives to archive our work, most photographers are now using either the Cloud or NAS’s (Network Attached Storage).
The Cloud can be handy for sharing work with your clients while knowing that some angel up there is quietly managing the back-ups to the back-ups. But paying to store large archives of work can get expensive – and what happens when you forget to pay your storage bill or the Cloud itself crashes or is hacked?
I use the Cloud to deliver work to my clients but I rely on Synology NAS’s to archive my work.
Unlike external hard drives, a NAS uses multiple hard drives and a built-in computer to actively monitor and protect your data using RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) technology. Using SHR technology (Synology Hybrid RAID,
